Co-production
Science & Technology Studies (STS) is kind of a narrow field, but it comprises quite a diverse set of theories that can be kinda hard to keep in your head at one time. One STS idea I quite like is Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of Co-production, which like much work in STS, attempts to reconcile human agency (the social) with technological determinism. This resolution is achieved by saying that both produce each other, in a bit of circular logic that’s similar to how Giddens solves for subjective/objective duality using a form of recursion.
In her introduction to States of Knowledge, Jasanoff has a nice short segment that sums up a set of STS theories in the context of co-production, that I think is useful for thinking about STS more generally (Jasanoff, 2006, pp. 5–6). I wanted to jot it down here in case I go searching for a neat packaging of STS… and I also wanted to make sure I had these books in my BibTeX database :-)
Several recurrent and partially overlapping preoccupations in STS scholarship offer a means of organization (and, in the future fostering) work in the co-productionist idiom.
The first has to do with emergence and stabilization of new objects or phenomena; how people recognize them, name them, investigate them, and assign meaning to them; and how they mark them off from other existing entities, creating new languages in which to speak of them and new ways of visually representing them (Daston, 2000; Dear, 1995; Latour, 1988; Latour, 1993 ; Pickering, 2005 ).
The second concerns the framing and resolution of controversy. Under this heading, a large body of STS research has looked at the practices and processes by which one set of ideas gains supremacy over competing, possibly better established ones, or fails to do so (Martin & Richards, 1995 ; Shapin, 1985 ; Collins, 1985).
The third important line of research centers on the intelligibility and portability of the products of science and technology across time, place and institutional contexts. Topics under this heading range from the standardization of measures and analytic tools to the formation of new communities of practice, such as expert witnesses, who are capable of endowing claims with credibility as they are transported across different cultures of production and interpretation (Bowker & Star, 1999 ; Jasanoff, 1995 ; Shapin, 1994 ; Porter, 1992 ; Latour, 1987 ; Kuhn, 1962).
The fourth significant tradition examines the cultural practices of science and technology in contexts that endow them with legitimacy and meaning. Work in this vein has asked how the supposed universality of facts and artifacts fares in disparate political and cultural settings, as well as how different domains of research and development acquire and retain particular cultural characteristics (Knorr-Cetina, 1999 ; Rabinow, 1996 ; Traweek, 1988).