Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society by Bruno Latour
Wiebe E. Bijker · Technology and Culture · 1988
982 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. By Bruno Latour. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. viii + 274; figures, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $25.00. Bruno Latour takes his entry “through the back door of science in the making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready made science” (p. 4) and reports compellingly on scientists and engineers as they construct facts, artifacts, and society. In the first part of Science in Action, Latour shows how scientific facts and technical machines emerge, and that it is this construction process, science and technology in the making, that we should study to under stand its results, ready-made science and technology. Both are as in timately tied together as the two sides ofJanus’s head: the ready-made side arguing that “once a machine works, people will be convinced,” while the in-the-making side says that “the machine will work when all the relevant people are convinced” (p. 10). Facts and machines do not have intrinsic qualities that can be evoked to explain their devel opment; their fate is in later users’ hands. Thus, the qualities of facts and machines are the consequence, not the cause, ofa collective action. Following this advice will plunge you into controversies—going from daily life to science is not like going from noise to quiet, from passion to reason. “It is like reading a law book and then going to court to watch a jury wavering under the impact of contradictory evidence” (p. 30). Latour makes it clear that such an approach implies that we should no longer try to decide about the objectivity or subjectivity of a statement or the working or nonworking of a machine, but follow the fate of statements and machines instead, as they are made objective or working (or the opposite) through the hands of engineers, scien tists, and other users. In the second part, the author identifies the mechanisms by which engineers and scientists give strength to their statements and machines in order to see them become objective and working. Here Latour convincingly criticizes the standard “diffusion model” as contrasted with the “translation model.” In the diffusion model, facts and ma chines seem to have a momentum of their own, and through some ingenious mating system they reproduce one another. “They seem to move . . . without people. More fantastic, it seems they would have existed even without people” (p. 133). In the translation model, Die sel’s engine, for example, is not described as an idea that was always out there and needed only to be discovered, but as a constantly chang ing combination of elements, ushered forward while being modified by human engineers, financiers, licensers, and users. The diffusion model necessarily creates a distinction between “technoscience” and society, between humans and nonhumans, whereas the translation model can provide a symmetrical analysis of these various elements. Thus, a distinction between social and technical is not to be made a TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 983 priori by the researchers but should be analyzed as the result of the engineers’ work. In the final section, Latour uses the “network” con cept to analyze further the relations of facts, machines, and society. In so doing, he illuminates the role of scale models, mathematical formulae, and metrology. What does this book offer to the historian of technology? It does not present new historical case studies, nor does it provide a straight forward theory of technological development. It is, however, address ing one of the central concerns of the SHOT tradition—the relationship between technology and its context. Latour radically transcends the distinction between technology and its context by purging the reader’s mind of worn-out concepts and by developing a completely new vo cabulary to describe and analyze the seamless web of technology, sci ence, and society. He can do this only by building on the rich tradition of recent history of technology, using, for example, numerous articles from Technology and Culture. This is the kind of book that may, at the end of its story, leave you exasperated, perhaps even furious at the author who has been leading you to...