Social Knowledge in the Making

Charles Camic is the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and the author or editor of several volumes, including, most recently, Essential Writings of Thorstein Veblen. Neil Gross is associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and the author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Michèle Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, professor of sociology, and professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book is How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2011.

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09208-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09209-6 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-09208-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-09209-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09210-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Social Knowledge in the making /edited by Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09208-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-09208-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09209-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-09209-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social sciences—Research. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of. I. Camic, Charles. II. Gross, Neil, 1971–III. Lamont, Michèle, 1957–

H62.S635 2011

301.01—dc22 2011001799

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

Social Knowledge in the Making

Edited by

CHARLES CAMIC, NEIL GROSS, AND MICHÈLE LAMONT

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

To our students—past, present, and future

CONTENTS

Preface

CHARLES CAMIC, NEIL GROSS, AND MICHÈLE LAMONT

INTRODUCTION /The Study of Social Knowledge Making

PART I : KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE DISCIPLINES

ANDREW ABBOTT

ONE /Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century

ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

TWO /In Clio’s American Atelier

REBECCA LEMOV

THREE /Filing the Total Human: Anthropological Archives from 1928 to 1963

NEIL GROSS AND CRYSTAL FLEMING

FOUR /Academic Conferences and the Making of Philosophical Knowledge

JOHAN HEILBRON

FIVE /Practical Foundations of Theorizing in Sociology: The Case of Pierre Bourdieu

PART II : KNOWLEDGE EVALUATION SITES

MICHÈLE LAMONT AND KATRI HUUTONIEMI

SIX /Comparing Customary Rules of Fairness: Evaluative Practices in Various Types of Peer Review Panels

LAURA STARK

SEVEN /Meetings by the Minute(s): How Documents Create Decisions for Institutional Review Boards

MARILYN STRATHERN

EIGHT /An Experiment in Interdisciplinarity: Proposals and Promises

PART III : SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE BEYOND THE ACADEMY

SARAH E. IGO

NINE /Subjects of Persuasion: Survey Research as a Solicitous Science; or, The Public Relations of the Polls

SHEILA JASANOFF

TEN /The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science

GRÉGOIRE MALLARD AND ANDREW LAKOFF

ELEVEN /How Claims to Know the Future Are Used to Understand the Present: Techniques of Prospection in the Field of National Security

DANIEL BRESLAU

TWELVE /What Do Market Designers Do When They Design Markets? Economists as Consultants to the Redesign of Wholesale Electricity Markets in the United States

KARIN KNORR CETINA

THIRTEEN /Financial Analysis: Epistemic Profile of an Evaluative Science

Contributors

Notes

Index

PREFACE

This book concerns the thick underbrush of practices that are involved in the production, evaluation, and application of social knowledge, and in working on the project we have grown increasingly cognizant of the many knowledge practices that we ourselves engaged in along the way. Our computers at this point store thousands of emails sent back and forth among the three of us—and to and from dozens of others who have been associated with this volume in different capacities—as we formulated, rethought, and frequently recast our plans in view of an ever-changing web of intellectual and logistical challenges and opportunities.

The project originated in 2004 from a series of chance conversations that made us realize that we shared a sense of frustration. As sociologists, we had a common area of research interest: knowledge production and evaluation in the social sciences and the humanities. As we talked among ourselves, however, we were struck that one of the main sources of intellectual sustenance for each of us was the vibrant body of scholarship that dealt with knowledge production, assessment, and use in the natural sciences. Each of us, of course, had works that we greatly admired that addressed the development of knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities. Still, we felt that there was a marked disparity and that scholars in the field of science studies and related areas of contemporary research offered revealing insights into the production and evaluation of natural knowledge that had fewer counterparts in studies of social knowledge. For some time, we were unclear as to the reasons for this disparity and even less clear about what, if anything, might be done about it.

Eventually, we became convinced that at least part of the problem lay in the fact that the much-heralded turn to practice had, up to this time, penetrated the study of social knowledge in comparatively more limited ways. We came to this realization not on our own but because of our growing awareness that, here and there in the social sciences and the humanities, scholars familiar with research in science studies but interested primarily in the development of social knowledge were definitely beginning to train their attention on knowledge practices outside the natural sciences. Even so, efforts of this kind seemed, at this point, relatively isolated from each other, spread across different disciplines and specialty areas and sometimes still overshadowed by work in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge. We thought that situating and organizing the more recent lines of research in relationship to one another could be beneficial and open up an agenda of new questions that, because they were as yet unanswered, might encourage more research in this vein—research that not only would eventually correct some of the existing imbalance between the study of natural knowledge and the study of social knowledge but (more importantly) would raise the general level of understanding of the processes by which different forms of social knowledge are produced, evaluated, and put to use. Our hope is that this volume takes a modest step in this direction.

In the course of this project, we have received substantial organizational support and collegial counsel, for which we are grateful. A grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies enabled us to conduct an exploratory seminar on the social study of the social sciences and the humanities in the spring of 2005 and to convene a superb group of scholars who helped us delineate and circumscribe our project. A few of them eventually became contributors to this volume. Others in that group included Mitchell Ash, Tom Bender, Homi Bhabha, Don Brenneis, Craig Calhoun, Marion Fourcade, Peter Galison, Howard Gardner, Joshua Guetzkow, John Guillory, Stanley Katz, Veronica Boix Mansilla, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Chandra Mukerji, Ted Porter, Steven Shapin, and Stephen Turner. This initial meeting led to a symposium in December 2007 hosted at the Russell Sage Foundation, where drafts of the chapters in this volume were first presented. These drafts benefited from the comments and suggestions of a sharp and diverse group of participants that included, in addition to our authors, Don Brenneis, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Marion Fourcade, Rakesh Khurana, Erin Leahey, and Diane Vaughan. For valuable advice on the manuscript that resulted from this symposium, we appreciate as well the reports of two anonymous reviewers from the University of Chicago Press.

Throughout this process, this project has also been generously supported by various units at our home institutions: Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the University of British Columbia. We thank those responsible for arranging this support and express our appreciation as well to Adam Kissel, Phillis Strimling, Tracy Blanchard, Heather Latham, and Travis Clough for their able technical assistance. Finally, we warmly thank the authors of the chapters of this volume for joining us in this undertaking and accommodating our many requests along the way to its completion. The combined contributions of the authors, colleagues, administrators, editors, reviewers, staff assistants, and others with whom we had the pleasure of working kept us continually aware of what an irreducibly collective practice social knowledge making is.

INTRODUCTION

The Study of Social Knowledge Making

CHARLES CAMIC, NEIL GROSS, AND MICHÈLE LAMONT

In recent decades, scholars in various corners of the academy have lived through a major shift in knowledge culture. Beginning quietly around the time of the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and gathering momentum during the past quarter century, this shift has involved a growing awareness and appreciation on the part of humanists, social scientists, and scientists themselves of the ways in which mundane scientific practices enable and constrain the bodies of knowledge that scientists produce as well as the social worlds in which they work. This reflexive turn to practice has been fed by an explosion of sophisticated theory and research in the vibrant interdisciplinary field of science studies, or science and technology studies (STS). Up to this point in its comparatively young history, however, the literature of STS has focused predominantly on the natural sciences, pure and applied, with a modest uptick of recent attention to the most conspicuously scientific of the social sciences. As leading scholars in the field now openly acknowledge, though, vast expanses of the dense forest in which the making of social knowledge occurs remain still to be illuminated from the perspective of the turn to practice—a telling lacuna in a historical era when social knowledge, academic and nonacademic, is of increasing salience and consequence in many areas of social life. This lacuna provides the point of departure for the present book, which is concerned with the practices by which a diverse range of social knowledge forms are produced, evaluated, and put to use.

The volume contains thirteen original empirical studies of what we call social knowledge practices. As such, it is, we believe, the first collection of its kind, though (as we will elaborate) it descends intellectually from several existing traditions of scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, most directly from the lineage of STS itself, as the chapters seek to focus some of the conceptual lenses of STS on a few of the many historical and contemporary locations of social knowledge production, evaluation, and use. In doing so, the hope of the contributors is that a vigorous flow of additional empirical studies will follow, leading to an accumulation of research and theory that trains the collective eye of scholars on the makeup and distribution of social knowledge practices, the processes through which they arise and change, their significance for the analysis and interpretation of the social worlds of their inhabitants, and their implications for an understanding of how these worlds both resemble and differ from those found in the natural sciences.

We divide this introduction into three sections. In the first, we attempt to clarify our terminology, indicating what we mean by social knowledge, practices, and so forth. As well, we offer a brief sketch of past scholarship on the making of social knowledge to furnish the context for the empirical chapters that follow. In the next section, we overview these chapters individually and situate them within the organization of the volume. In the last section, we consider what the thirteen chapters, taken as a whole, appear to suggest about social knowledge practices. On this basis, we also identify some of the previously unarticulated questions that the chapters open up as an agenda for future research on the topic.

I

Academic and popular writings frequently characterize the societies of the present epoch as knowledge societies, knowledge economies, or knowledge cultures. Commentators use such expressions to describe the rapid acceleration, over the course of the last half century, of a trend that dates from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: the massive influence of scientific research on everyday life, as demonstrated most recently by developments in the fields of biotechnology and information technology. This theme of the far-reaching practical effects of the contemporary natural sciences is consistent with scholarship on the pivotal role that the physical and chemical sciences played during the previous three hundred years in transforming methods of production and patterns of consumption, but the narrative generally occludes the place of multiple kinds of social knowledge in the knowledge societies of today.¹ A near cipher two centuries ago, social knowledge has subsequently become a ubiquitous feature of the societal landscape, buffeting those in our own time with urgent economic data, reports, and forecasts; reams of demographic information; statistics on crime, marriage, employment, housing, religiosity, and life satisfaction; polls and instant analyses of the state of the electorate and of national security conditions; as well as with social classificatory schemes, psychological evaluations, and educational test results—to say nothing of the literally hundreds of thousands of books, articles, and lectures that are produced annually both by academic social scientists and by journalists, jurists, pundits, personal advisers, and innumerable other creators and distributors of varieties of human knowledge that fall beyond the bounds of the natural sciences.

Our conception of social knowledge is an expansive one, and this volume examines only a small range of the many different forms of social knowledge. By social knowledge we mean, in the first instance, descriptive information and analytical statements about the actions, behaviors, subjective states, and capacities of human beings and/or about the properties and processes of the aggregate or collective units—the groups, networks, markets, organizations, and so on—where these human agents are situated. In some instances, social knowledge statements may contain significant nonsocial referents (as, e.g., in studies of the impact of climate changes on the welfare of the population of a certain region), but these referents constitute only one component of those statements. We omit from this definition fictional and fabricated material that might otherwise seem to fit our conception, reserving social knowledge for data and statements that seek to advance empirically based and empirically warrantable claims about the present, the past, or the future, though we include two further elements as well. These are (1) normative statements that draw on descriptive information to recommend or condemn certain courses of human conduct, programs for collective action, and so on; and (2) the technologies and tools of knowledge making—that is, the epistemic principles, cognitive schemata, theoretical models, conceptual artifacts, technical instruments, methodological procedures, tacit understandings, and material devices by which descriptive and normative statements about the social world are produced, assessed, represented, communicated, and preserved. We would emphasize, however, that we offer this definition solely for the purpose of orienting readers to the subject matter of this volume, not to impose hard-and-fast boundaries. The precise scope of social knowledge, we believe, differs across historical settings and varies significantly with the authority and ambitions of those who claim to speak on its behalf, as well as with the authority and ambitions of their opponents.

Because our language lacks an all-inclusive term for the women and men who participate in the production, evaluation, and use of what counts as social knowledge, throughout this volume different terms will appear in different contexts. When referring to those who specialize in producing, assessing, or applying social knowledge by virtue of faculty positions in higher educational institutions, we—and the other contributors—will use familiar expressions like social scientists and scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, or we will speak more specifically of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political philosophers, and so on. When we are discussing in addition (or instead) professional knowledge specialists located outside the academy, we will speak of social researchers, social policy experts, social knowledge makers, or social knowledge producers. Even the latter, most encompassing terms may mislead in certain instances, however, since (as several of the chapters make clear) some of the people involved in producing, evaluating, and applying social knowledge are not themselves specialized knowledge producers.

What any of these people do in the course of the production, evaluation, and application of the forms of social knowledge with which they deal is a topic that has, to this point in time, received relatively little empirical attention in the literature of the social sciences and the humanities. Many social scientists and humanists spend their entire professional lives creating social knowledge, but only sporadically have questions as to how this process occurs become the focus of systematic research in their own right. To be sure, all the disciplines that make up the social sciences and the humanities have a rich prescriptive literature on knowledge making, a vast storehouse of how-to manuals and other writings covering basic and advanced methods of research. Historically, however, none of these disciplines has placed social knowledge making among its primary subjects of empirical research.

In this circumstance, the topic of social knowledge making has for several generations led a fugitive and splintered existence on several disconnected islands of scholarship, whereupon a certain restrictive perspective on the subject has tended to hold sway. For easy reference, we call this perspective the traditional approach to social knowledge (TASK), recognizing that this viewpoint has existed more as a cluster of diffuse assumptions than as a formalized approach that scholars have branded as such. The locus classicus of TASK has been the literature of the history of ideas, specifically studies of the genesis of the ideas of individual social thinkers and intellectual movements, although the approach has also been common in work with the same focus in fields such as the history of philosophy, the history of political economy, the history of anthropology, and the history of psychology. Outside these historical specialty areas, TASK has figured more recently in research on the intellectual origins of a range of social policies as well as in various strands of scholarship in cultural studies.

Within our own discipline, too, TASK has been a major presence in the subfield known as the sociology of knowledge—a specialty area that serves conveniently to illustrate this common perspective on social knowledge making. By the sociology of knowledge, we refer to the subspecialty with this name that took shape in Europe in the 1920s; bore fruit at mid-century in influential works by C. Wright Mills ([1941] 1966), Herbert Marcuse (1964), Lewis Coser (1965, 1971), and Alvin Gouldner (1965, 1970); and, following a fallow period, has recently experienced a vigorous revival with the appearance of detailed accounts of developments in philosophy (Bourdieu 1991; Bryant 1996; Collins 1998; Fabiani 1988; Gross 2008; Lamont 1987; Wuthnow 1989), psychology (Kusch 1995, 1999), economics (Yonay 1998), literature (Sapiro 1999), and sociology (Bourdieu 2004), as well as in the social sciences and the humanities at large (Steinmetz 2005).²

As this enumeration indicates, the sociology of knowledge deals in significant measure with instances of what we have called social knowledge. This interest follows from the subfield’s original mandate to open up all (or nearly all) of human thought to sociological examination, for the realm of social thought is one that calls out naturally as an avenue of investigation to sociologists who are on this mission—hence the longstanding concern on the part of sociologists of knowledge with the ideas (the doctrines, theories, propositions, etc.) of social and political thinkers, philosophers, economists, psychologists, and so forth. Of most relevance in the current context, though, is the fact that it is in studies where scholars have pursued this concern that the components of TASK stand out especially clearly. Although there are of course exceptions, studies in the sociology of knowledge typically take the following form: (1) focusing on a particular social thinker (or set of social thinkers), the researcher begins post festum, with the thinker’s ideas already known, fixed in the canonical documents of his or her intellectual tradition or field (philosophy, economics, sociology, etc.); (2) working backward, the researcher then traces the origins of those known ideas to external social sources, generally conceptualized in terms of macrolevel economic, political, and ideological conditions, as well as the thinker’s class-or group-based interests.³ In this sense, the analytic approach of the sociology of knowledge has generally proceeded from an implicit input/output model, with societal macrofactors serving as inputs and finished ideas as outputs. This manner of treating the production of social knowledge is what we mean by TASK, and the contributions of the approach have in some ways been considerable. More explicitly than perhaps any other body of scholarship, research in this vein has linked social thinkers’ abstract ideas to the material and cultural circumstances of the societies in which they live, while also identifying the connections between the social positions occupied by producers of social knowledge and the shape and content of their intellectual productions.⁴

Viewed in light of later developments, however, what TASK has widely neglected, in common with other input/output models, are the mediating terms—in this case, the day-to-day actions and processes through which the producers of social knowledge actually go about the on-the-ground work of making, evaluating, and disseminating the kinds of social knowledge that they are involved in producing. In the current scholarly literature, the general term for actions and processes of this type is practices, and we adopt this convention in this volume, hoping (as we stated above) to extend the contemporary turn to practice to the study of social knowledge in order not only to address a serious absence in the traditional approach to social knowledge but more importantly to foreground a set of empirical questions that TASK has thus far marginalized. In taking this step, we follow the lead of researchers in STS (as we will elaborate below) as well as the example of a diverse range of practice theorists throughout the social sciences and the humanities more broadly, including Margaret Archer, Pierre Bourdieu, Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault, Harold Garfinkel, Anthony Giddens, Hans Joas, Sherry Ortner, William Sewell Jr., Quentin Skinner, Charles Taylor, and Charles Tilly, to name only a few.

In accord with this body of work, we define practices as the ensembles of patterned activities—the modes of working and doing, in Amsterdamska’s (2008, 206) words—by which human beings confront and structure the situated tasks with which they are engaged. These activities may be intentional or unintentional, interpersonally cooperative or antagonistic, but they are inherently multifaceted, woven of cognitive, emotional, semiotic, appreciative, normative, and material components, which carry different valences in different contexts. So understood, practices include both the taken-for-granted routines to which Swidler (2001, 75) calls attention and what Schatzki (2001, 7) refers to as open sets of nonregularized actions. Still further, neither nonregularized nor routine modes of action are analytically reducible to the ideas and purposes of the agents undertaking them. That is so because, although some activities are highly sensitive to agents’ objectives and beliefs, even in these instances purposive factors constitute—according to the writings of practice theorists—only one among the many heterogeneous contingencies that impinge upon and shape situated practices. As a rule, moreover, these contingencies fall neither on one or the other side of the hoary divide between micro- and macro- social forces, since practices—as several of the chapters in this volume will illustrate—generally enfold and meld together factors that nonpractice scholars have tended to assign to very different levels of the social world (see also note 21 below).⁵

Outside the ambit of TASK, the subject of social practices has gained substantial traction among contemporary social scientists and humanists for a variety of reasons, some of them somewhat discrepant from others. The broadest point of consensus is that subjecting practices to analysis opens up the black box of social life: the intricate web of situated human experience which traditional conceptions of human action, social structure, and culture all elided. For some scholars, this move is motivated by explanatory questions, that is, by an interest in locating within practices the underlying causal processes or mechanisms by which certain social factors translate (or fail to translate) into various downstream consequences, as well as in identifying the upstream sources of those processes. For other scholars, interpretive questions have primacy, and comprehending agents’ practices is essential for understanding the subjective meanings that they attach to what they say and do. For still other social scientists and humanists, practices are compelling objects of investigation on more intrinsic grounds; by examining them, researchers can either discover otherwise-concealed social regularities or (according to an inverse rationale) deconstruct the very notion of such regularities. Either way, scholars continue, analyzing social practices reinserts human conduct into its specific historical contexts and preserves its multidimensionality, thus not only challenging universalizing claims about the nature of action but encouraging critical reflexivity about this constitutive aspect of the social world on the part of researchers studying social practices—and, by extension, on the part of agents engaging in those practices.⁶

Because of its widespread neglect of the mundane actions and processes by which the makers of social knowledge carry out their work, TASK has necessarily sidelined this entire range of explanatory, interpretive, contextualizing, reflective, and intrinsic concerns. By so doing, moreover, not only has TASK left several major voids, but its very inattention to the daily routines of knowledge production, evaluation, and use has spawned the assumption, which runs deep in the sociology of knowledge, that the activities involved in social knowledge making are monolithic and enclosed. In civil engineering, a monolith is a structure, large or small, made up of simple and homogeneous elements combined into a single, solid block, and the metaphor fits the image of knowledge production latent in TASK. Sociologists of knowledge do not, after all, deny that knowledge-making activities of a kind happen; rather, their studies recognize, at least implicitly, that social thinkers do read the literatures of their intellectual traditions and fields, do cogitate about weighty intellectual questions, and do write their thoughts down in words. Rarely, however, does TASK’s conception of the everyday work of knowledge making go further than these unexamined (and unproblematized) activities of reading, thinking, and writing, each understood as joined to the others in a seamless bloc—and to characterize the production of social knowledge in this manner is, in effect, to depict it as a monolith (in miniature). Likewise, TASK has fostered an enclosed vision of the locational sites where the activities of knowledge making occur. Reading, thinking, writing—these are not actions that ordinarily have strong spatial associations. To the extent that sociologists of knowledge and other proponents of TASK have situated these activities at all, this has generally been within an imagined nexus that the sociologist constructs by overlaying the particular macrosocial forces that he or she wishes to emphasize onto the bounded space of the intellectual tradition, school, field, or academic unit to which the social thinker under study belongs. The circumscribed nexus that results is, by implication, the location of the thinker’s cogitating, reading, and writing, as TASK overlooks other, more concrete sites of knowledge practices.

In our view, however, there is a promising alternative perspective, and it lies in the field of STS and in the example set by the ongoing efforts of STS researchers to open the black box of knowledge making in the natural sciences. A half century ago, something closely akin to TASK’s monolithic and enclosed view of knowledge making was common among historians of science, who treated natural scientific knowledge mainly as a system of propositions arranged into theories formulated by scientists with tried-and-true methods that were unproblematically associated with their specialties and disciplines (Amsterdamska 2008, 205–6). No part of this image of the production of natural scientific knowledge has withstood subsequent scrutiny, however. For if the turn to practice that has rippled through the social sciences and the humanities in recent decades has had a radiating center, that center has been STS as the field has taken shape in the work of figures like Thomas Kuhn and (more explicitly thereafter) Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Michel Callon, Adele Clarke, Harry Collins, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Donna Haraway, Karin Knorr Cetina, Sheila Jasanoff, Bruno Latour, Donald MacKenzie, Andrew Pickering, Trevor Pinch, and Steven Shapin, among many others, whose writings have, in different ways, shifted scholarly attention away from science as a finished product in the temple of human knowledge and toward the study of the multiple, multilayered, and multisited practices involved during the long hours when future kernels of scientific knowledge are still in the making.

This significant change in viewpoint has been much slower to reverberate outward to the study of social knowledge, however. Emerging as a critique of the historiography of the natural sciences, STS began with its focus riveted on the physical and biological sciences, and scholars in the area openly concede their long-running bias toward studying the bigger and harder sciences (Hackett et al. 2008, 6, quoting Ina Spiegel-Rosing, writing in 1977).⁷ Not only did the physical and biological sciences stand out as the very prototype of Science; but as the privileged authorities on Nature, they also raised challenging questions that exerted a stronger pull within STS than the seemingly more transparent workings of the various softer sciences. More recently, though, STS has become more skeptical of that supposed transparency and more disposed to greater inclusiveness, as researchers have turned to the study of the computational and environmental sciences, medicine and engineering, and media and information technologies. Concurrent with this expansion, moreover, STS scholars have built the case that Nature cannot be privileged as a fixed, transhistorical category; that the boundary between Nature and Society is itself a social construction; that the knowledge-making practices of natural scientists are thoroughly configured by the social worlds that they inhabit; and that those same practices have powerful spillover effects on the practices of social scientists.⁸

Despite all these salutary developments, however, STS itself has yet to investigate the practices involved in the making of social knowledge to anything approaching the extent that it has examined the practices in use in the physical and biological sciences (and in cognate fields) or to make social knowledge practices a core topic of empirical research.⁹ By no means is this observation a criticism, since it would obviously be frivolous to fault STS scholars for investigating the very topics that constitute the agenda of their own field. Moreover, this is an agenda that STS researchers have pursued with great success, as is evident in the large, empirically detailed, and theoretically rich literature that they have produced, as well as in the light this literature has shed on some of the larger explanatory, interpretive, reflexive, and other concerns raised by practice theorists. Even so, researchers interested in social knowledge cannot miss the disparity. The authoritative (1,000 + page) third edition of The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Hackett et al. 2008), for example, lists literally thousands of studies of the natural sciences and related fields but scarcely any STS research dealing explicitly with the social sciences, let alone with humanistic and lay forms of social knowledge.

Despite its relatively thin past history in this regard, however, STS has recently shown signs of rising interest in a few harder—presumptively more scientific—types of social knowledge.¹⁰ The first of these signs is a rapidly growing volume of research on the production and use of different kinds of economic knowledge, particularly financial knowledge—the one form of social knowledge that The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies singles out for discussion (see Preda 2008; more generally see Breslau 1997, 2003; Callon 1998; Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002; Evans 1997; Guala 2001; Guala and Salanti 2001; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000, 2002; Knorr Cetina and Preda 2001, 2006; MacKenzie 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2004, 2006; MacKenzie and Millo 2003; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007; Mirowski 1999, 2002, 2004; Morgan and Butter 2000; Pinch and Swedberg 2008; Power 1997; Preda 2006, 2009; Yonay 2000; cf. Ashmore, Mulkay, and Pinch 1989). A second development has been a modest flow of studies concerning the practices entailed in knowledge making in psychology¹¹ (Ashmore, Brown, and MacMillan 2005; Chamak 1999; Galison 2004; Osborne 1993; Shadish et al. 1995; Smith et al. 2000; Smyth 2001).¹² A third development has been a scattering of practice-oriented studies on some of the basic tools and technologies of social knowledge making:¹³ focus groups (Lezaun 2007), survey interviews (Maynard and Schaeffer 2000), game-theoretic models (Swedberg 2001), and especially statistical methods (MacKenzie 1981; Porter 1986, 1995)—with work on this last topic shading over into a much larger literature on the history of quantification in the natural and social sciences (e.g., Camic and Xie 1994; Desrosières 1998; Hacking 1990; Marks 1997; Matthews 1995; Stigler 1986; Weintraub 1991, 2002).

Complementing STS’s growing interest in these particular kinds of social knowledge practices, furthermore, have been four other relevant lines of research that are less immediately associated with STS: (1) studies of the history of social research methods (e.g., Calhoun 2007; Converse 2009; Igo 2007; Leahey 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Lemov 2005; Platt 1996); (2) work on the rhetoric of the social sciences and the humanities (e.g., Agger 2000; Bazerman and Paradis 1991; Green 1988; McCloskey 1998; Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987); (3) scholarship on the organization of academic reference networks (e.g., Clemens et al. 1995; Hargens 2000; Pontille 2003; Whitley 1984) and of peer review and other evaluation processes in the social sciences and humanities (e.g., Brenneis 1994, 1999, 2006; Guetzkow, Lamont, and Mallard 2004; Lamont 2009; Mallard, Lamont, and Guetzkow 2009; Strathern 2000); and (4) a burgeoning literature, mainly within cultural anthropology, on anthropologists’ knowledge-making practices.

Viewing these recent signs in tandem, an important trend in the study of social knowledge seems to be under way. Indeed, if one groups together and connects the several literatures to which we have just referred, we seem to be witnessing the quiet passing of the traditional approach to social knowledge and the overdue arrival of social knowledge practices as a central topic for empirical investigation. Nevertheless, so far as we are aware, the scholars involved in these lines of research have yet to recognize this point themselves or to inquire into the larger implications of their projects for understanding the nature of social knowledge generally. To the contrary: the connecting, grouping together, and viewing in tandem that we have just described represent our own integration of largely discrete contemporary developments, not a concerted movement currently in progress either inside STS or outside it.

In this sense, the foregoing depiction of the rising tide of research on social knowledge practices imposes upon the current situation a unity and a teleology that it has yet to exhibit on it own. At the present time, for example, studies of economic and financial knowledge speak mainly to one another and to work on the natural sciences and their technologies, not to research on knowledge making in psychology, studies of focus groups and survey interviews, work on the rhetoric of the social sciences and the humanities, or scholarship on anthropological knowledge making—and each of the converses holds as well. To be sure, the relative mutual isolation of these valuable bodies of work may feed the internal growth of each of them; but their disconnection from one another nevertheless delays wider recognition of social knowledge practices as objects of investigation in their own right. In our view, however, such recognition is essential. Until more researchers understand financial knowledge, psychological knowledge, anthropological knowledge, survey knowledge, as well as the many forms of social knowledge that have thus far gone unstudied, all as branches of a larger species that is social knowledge, they will be diverted from explicitly tracking and mapping the diverse members of this fertile species, studying its branches in relation to one another, and examining the similarities and differences in the practices by which the various branches produce, evaluate, and apply the types of social knowledge with which they deal. This angle of approach provides the starting point for the chapters that follow.

II

Social knowledge, as we have said, is a ubiquitous phenomenon, as it has been, with ever increasing spread, since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. To track it to sites along the full spectrum of its many historical and contemporary locations and adequately investigate its working in all those settings, however, is a task well beyond the scope of any single volume on social knowledge practices. That being the case, in planning this collection, we sought contributions that would consider social knowledge at some familiar and at some less familiar sites, treating practices of knowledge making not only within the established academic disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities but also in both interdisciplinary and nonacademic contexts. Likewise, we were concerned not to limit the range of knowledge-making practices to settings where knowledge production is central but also to include settings where processes of knowledge evaluation and knowledge application have priority.

This plan has resulted in the tripartite structure of the volume. The five chapters in part I, Knowledge Production in the Disciplines, examine a few of the knowledge-making practices characteristic of some of the traditional academic disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities. The three chapters in part II, Knowledge Evaluation Sites, analyze a trio of interdisciplinary settings where practices of knowledge evaluation occur. Finally, the five chapters in part III, Social Knowledge beyond the Academy, consider several nonacademic institutions involved in the production and use of certain more contemporary forms of social knowledge.

The scholars who have written these chapters come from a range of academic fields and do not represent a unitary professional group. Contributors differ in their theoretical proclivities, the intellectual generations to which they belong, and the times and places that they treat in their chapters. As well, they differ in the research methods by which they carried out the studies that they here report. Several authors rely heavily on archival documents, supplemented with secondary sources; several others present results from interviews that they conducted with various social knowledge experts; still others make use of different kinds of ethnographic observation; and one assembles and analyzes various quantitative data. Appropriately, a number of contributors combine these methods. As we will see, such methodological variety befits the different social knowledge practices that these authors investigate. For all their differences, however, what unites the contributors is their departure from the traditional approach to social knowledge in favor of a careful analysis of some of the many situated activities by which producers of social knowledge actually go about their work.

In the five chapters of part I, Knowledge Production in the Disciplines, social knowledge makers appear in the familiar guise of academic social scientists and humanists, and what each chapter does is to interrogate a neglected cluster of knowledge-making practices and probe its upstream sources and downstream effects. In the first three chapters, all concerned with turning points in the history of the social sciences and the humanities in the United States, the practices are those by which disciplinary specialists conceive and access the universe of documentary material from which they then build their own scholarship.

In chapter 1, Andrew Abbott focuses on researchers in the social sciences and the humanities who rely on library materials—books, periodicals, documents, archival records, and so on. Posing the question of how scholars in these fields acquire awareness of the existence of relevant library resources, sift and winnow those resources, and gain physical access to them at the particular institutions where they work, Abbott uncovers significant transformations, from the late nineteenth century to the present, in the technologies and accompanying practices involved in identifying and locating library materials. Propelled by a series of changes in the demography of American higher education, as well as by the interests of a supporting cast of librarians, commercial publishers, and representatives of professional organizations, these alterations in library research practice gradually transformed social scientists and humanists from scholars who had immediate physical access to the entire (but finite) literature of their disciplines into the specialists of recent decades who are increasingly overwhelmed by the quantity of publications and the proliferation of professional reference guides and, accordingly, have been deserting libraries and curtailing their reading. Still further, Abbott highlights how access drove use: the direct connection between the materials that scholars had at their disposal, at different stages in the evolution of library practices, and the kinds of scholarship they were enabled to produce.

Chapter 2 concerns the discipline of history over the same period and furnishes an account convergent with Abbott’s about major changes in knowledge-making practices. In the chapter, Anthony Grafton considers the day-to-day work that constitutes historical work and the two different workplaces that have defined it over time: the graduate seminar and the archive. Reminding those who view historical research as the study of collections of manuscripts in distant archives of the recency of this conception, Grafton emphasizes that from the 1880s to the 1950s most American historians worked chiefly with printed sources found at (or near) their local university. In doing so, they relied upon a standard package of techniques acquired in graduate research seminars, which were then hands-on apprenticeships in specially equipped rooms where, through recurrent technical exercises, historians-in-training became practiced in the critical examination of printed primary sources and other documents and in the construction (from these sources) of historical narratives on generally agreed-upon topics. As seminar graduates fanned out to different universities and pursed research careers according to this model, the result was a body of scholarship unified by the impress of the seminar, though subsequently the relation between the discipline of historical research and that of the historical seminar has become less and less direct. Instead, as travel to remote archival collections (each distinctive and, ideally, never before excavated) became the sine qua non of historical practice—due to changes in the economics and demography of higher education—the seminar ceased to provide all-purpose instruction in the techniques of historical research. On Grafton’s account, such developments have increasingly fragmented historical scholarship, causing it to splinter in accord with the diverse interests of the men and women entering the discipline.

In chapter 3, Rebecca Lemov examines a complementary aspect of social knowledge makers’ use of available documentary material: the deliberate practices they sometimes undertake to configure stores of existing information into new forms. Lemov’s case in point is the monumental effort of mid-twentieth-century anthropologists—and their allies in psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis—to custom-build collections of relevant research materials by ransacking troves of cultural, social, and psychological data. Originating in a neoevolutionary project intended to facilitate the comprehensive and rapid comparison of all human cultures across a large number of commensurable categories, the construction of anthropological data banks, Lemov argues, acquired a life of its own as scores of university support personnel were employed to carve up printed texts, transfer the gleanings to index cards, and file the cards into predetermined categories—thereby giving rise to a new, more material and standardized notion of what constitutes a social scientific fact. Almost immediately, however, this practice of fact making by data bank construction not only impugned the theory that spawned it (and several successor theories as well) but also negated its own claims to totality, as it encouraged other academic and lay users to build—often with funding from foundations and the U.S. government—ever bigger data banks that served, with each iteration, to enlarge the meaning of fact, since a total data collection was never total enough for the practitioners involved.

The next two chapters shift attention to the present day and center on a different unit of analysis. Rather than focusing (like the historical chapters by Abbott, Grafton, and Lemov) on entire generations of social knowledge makers, both chapters take the intellectual career of a single knowledge producer as a lens onto a dimly understood knowledge practice. In chapter 4, Neil Gross and Crystal Fleming hone in on an everyday problem that is a counterpart to that observed by Abbott among contemporary researchers overwhelmed by vast quantities of relevant literature to read: the severe time-shortage problem that bedevils academics of today—and that Jacobs and Winslow (2004) have documented as growing worse in recent decades due to institutional changes inside and outside the academy. Faced with this and other impediments to carrying on with the production of new knowledge, different scholars inevitably respond differently, and Gross and Fleming report a case study of a contemporary American political philosopher whose means of binding himself to the mast—enmeshing himself in a thicket of interpersonal obligations that will necessitate progress on his work, though in small and easy steps—is the practice of presenting work in progress before audiences at multidisciplinary conferences likely to be lenient in their evaluations. Gross and Fleming argue for the knowledge-generating significance of this extremely widespread practice, viewing conference participation not only as an occasion for communicating mature ideas but as a mechanism that can cause humanists and social scientists to gravitate toward certain research topics, address them in particular ways, and then pursue or abandon their work on these topics depending on audience feedback.

In chapter 5, Johan Heilbron turns to an unusual but often highly influential type of social knowledge maker: the sociological theorist who develops general models and abstract concepts designed to have a wide range of empirical applications. Heilbron’s example is the celebrated French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and his chapter builds the novel argument that the genesis of Bourdieu’s own general theory was not theoretical speculation or textual exegesis (as proponents of TASK might have it) but rather a distinctive research practice. Dissecting the features of this research practice, Heilbron brings to the fore Bourdieu’s hands-on immersion in a long succession of empirical research projects that were carried out by collaborative, multidisciplinary research teams yet were focused on different social arenas—thus requiring Bourdieu to engage routinely in the further practices of domain switching and boundary crossing. To these practices and several related sociocognitive mechanisms, Heilbron traces Bourdieu’s eventual move to formulate his sociology in a generalizing mode and to articulate the signature general concepts of his oeuvre.

Part II, Knowledge Evaluation Sites, examines another important aspect of the process of social knowledge making. As we have just noted, Gross and Fleming describe multidisciplinary conferences as settings for the lenient informal evaluation of academic work in progress. Yet in the contemporary era, early-stage evaluation of academic projects often occurs as well in formal, often multidisciplinary settings where decisions are made that directly affect whether particular knowledge-making projects go forward, undergo revision, or reach termination. The practices by which three major sites of this type reach evaluative decisions, along with the sources and outcomes of those practices, form the subject of the next three chapters.

Chief among these sites of evaluation are peer review panels, which are the focus of chapter 6. Here Michèle Lamont and Katri Huutoniemi investigate peer review panels organized at the national level in the United States and Finland. Their analysis examines how the social scientists and humanists on these panels manage, even though they come from different disciplines and universities and convene only rarely, to reach agreement about the relative merits of project proposals when assessing a wide range of applications seeking research funding. Central to this process, Lamont and Huutoniemi show, is a set of informal, and sometimes inconsistent, procedural rules that the panelists tacitly co-construct and then adhere to in the course of their deliberations. This practice enables social scientists and humanists to bridge their disciplinary differences, to perceive panel decision making as fair and objective (i.e., as meritocratic rather than corrupted by academic politics and self-interest), and to achieve consensus about the relative intellectual quality of the projects under review. As Lamont and Huutoniemi observe further, however, these particular rule-making and rule-following practices are by no means inevitable. Rather, they develop most fully in multidisciplinary panels charged with ranking applications and making funding decisions, and they are attenuated in panels with different procedural mandates and composed of natural scientists (or scholars in only one discipline)—a finding clearly illustrating the effect of organizational structure and composition on evaluative practices.

In chapter 7, Laura Stark investigates another major venue for the evaluation of social knowledge in the United States. She considers state-mandated institutional review boards (IRBs) operating at the local university level, where they bring together diverse actors—drawn from various academic departments, the university administration, and the surrounding community—to determine whether university researchers seeking to study human subjects have designed their projects with adequate ethical protections for those subjects. In this case, the evaluative outcome at stake is not funding but authorization to undertake a research project. Even so, Stark raises a question that parallels that posed by Lamont and Huutoniemi: how do disparate evaluators reach collective agreement? She answers this by uncovering IRB members’ practice of using the official minutes of their meetings—minutes that federal administrative law requires them to keep—not merely to report the outcome of their decisions retrospectively but also to negotiate among themselves the content of those decisions prospectively, thereby hammering out the specific project design requirements that social investigators thereafter have to satisfy to secure IRB approval for the research they want to conduct.

In chapter 8, Marilyn Strathern examines knowledge evaluation practices through a wide-ranging analysis of a contemporary institution of a newer but increasingly common type, the multidisciplinary research consortium: specifically, a knowledge park, inclusive of both social and natural scientists, which formed after a group of university and university-affiliated researchers in the United Kingdom successfully submitted a proposal for government funding of the venture. At the core of the researchers’ proposal, Strathern stresses, was interdisciplinarity—a notion that had recently become an element in the British government’s policy strategy for creating knowledge that would be useful to the general public. Where the chapters by Lamont and Huutoniemi and by Stark consider situations where multidisciplinary panels provide an organizational means to evaluate the quality and adequacy of research proposals, in the instance that Strathern explores, multidisciplinarity expands into an explicit organizational objective and mandate and, thus, into a salient criterion, in and of itself, for knowledge evaluation. Entrenched in this way at the U.K. knowledge park, multidisciplinarity catalyzed knowledge-making practices that promised and privileged collaboration, partnership, and communication across disciplines in the high expectation that these various forms of synergy would bear fruit in the future and eventually bring forth useful results. Strathern demonstrates, however, how multidisciplinarity practiced in this future-oriented, teleological way not only unleashed rising and falling waves of confounding emotional energies among consortium members but also led to the devaluation and discard of those disciplines that consortium administrators could not easily reconcile with their teleology—or, in other words, to the paradoxical accomplishment of interdisciplinarity by the removal of the discipline of sociology itself.

Strathern situates the research consortium that she analyzes within a mixed academic and nonacademic milieu, and the five chapters in part III, Social Knowledge beyond the Academy, continue this move outward from the traditional academic disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to a range of less familiar, yet historically ever more prevalent extra-academic sites where social knowledge is made and put to diverse uses in the private and public sectors. Like the authors of the previous chapters, though, the contributors to this section seek to bring to light the knowledge practices constitutive of each site under investigation and to analyze their antecedents and consequences.

In chapter 9, Sarah Igo begins this set of inquiries by examining commercial survey research organizations in the United States in the 1930s and the origins of modern public opinion polling. In doing so, she focuses especially on the heavy public relations efforts of early pollsters, like George Gallup and Elmo Roper, to convince members of a skeptical citizenry not only to become willing research subjects and to respond to the queries of anonymous interviewers but to go further still and accept the results of small representative samples as legitimate indicators of the state of American opinion at large. Igo views these public relations efforts as part of a much larger battery of practices of persuasion on which social researchers depend to secure the consent and cooperation necessary, now as much as in the past, to get their subjects to answer questionnaires on intrusive topics, submit to experiments, and acknowledge that such knowledge-making activities are intellectually and socially worthwhile.

The next three chapters turn attention to different kinds of social policy knowledge. In the first of these, chapter 10, Sheila Jasanoff focuses on the knowledge practices of social policy makers in the area of regulation—by which she means regulation by governmental agencies of widening spheres of social life such as banking and trade, health and safely, and so forth. Taking, in particular, the example of policy specialists working to establish knowledge claims relevant to the management of the risks posed to population groups by various environmental hazards—claims that are a hybrid of social knowledge and natural knowledge—Jasanoff asks how knowledge of this kind withstands partisan attacks and manages to keep the engines of policy humming. In answer, she emphasizes the importance to policy makers of wrapping their knowledge claims in the mantle of objectivity. However, according to Jasanoff, objectivity actually carries different meanings in different Western democracies (and international organizations) and, in all contexts, becomes a robust property of policy knowledge only as a result of multiple knowledge practices dispersed over many institutions. With regard to the United States, Jasanoff emphasizes the role of knowledge evaluation processes that range from quantitative risk assessments, through peer review, to judicial oversight of the rules of regulatory agencies. She demonstrates how these evaluation practices have abetted U.S. policy experts’ practices of public persuasion, enabling them to justify their knowledge claims as impartial, and also how these same practices have dovetailed with specialized legal and political practices of reasoning to cause the distinctively American view of objectivity to gain acceptance in global regulatory bodies like the World Trade Organization.

In chapter 11, Grégoire Mallard and Andrew Lakoff turn from regulatory policy to national security policy, contrasting two episodes involving U.S. security experts in the post–World War II period. Both cases point up the importance in this policy arena of knowledge-making practices that serve to envision a nation’s future in ways that then affect deliberations about national security at the present time. Conceptualizing these practices as techniques of prospection, Mallard and Lakoff examine their calculated use by security specialists to construct ambiguous events as security threats (or nonthreats) and thus to persuade political decision makers to act on the basis of these constructions. In the first episode, Mallard and Lakoff show how experts’ application of econometric forecasting techniques to an issue that political leaders regarded as a vital strategic matter effectively removed the issue from policy controversy. Conversely, in the second episode, Mallard and Lakoff follow the process by which security experts transformed a perceived nonsecurity problem into one recognized to be of highest urgency through the technique of the scenario-based exercise, which enfolded the issue at stake into a carefully designed enactment of an emotionally charged national catastrophe. Both examples reveal security specialists as keenly skilled at crafting and mobilizing social knowledge to project national futures in ways that shape policy decisions in the present.

In discussing security experts as designers of societal scenarios, Mallard and Lakoff’s second example highlights a feature of the practices of social knowledge making that has risen in consequence in recent decades and that the next chapter, chapter 12, considers in another context. Here, Daniel Breslau examines economists in their own role as designers—in this case, however, as designers not of future scenarios but of real-time markets in conjunction with current policy making in the area of energy regulation. Studying economic consultants who have been involved in filings to U.S. federal regulatory agencies tasked with overseeing markets for wholesale electricity, Breslau analyzes the processes by which economic experts formulate blueprints for market redesign and characterizes their knowledge practices as a combination of applied Platonism and mediation. Working to diagnose and address problems in existing electricity markets, economic consultants make constant appeal, according to Breslau, to the abstraction of the competitive market and then translate features of real markets into the language of this Platonic abstraction. By so doing, the experts produce a conceptualization of existing market flaws that guides them in crafting mechanisms (i.e., new sets of market rules) to compensate for market defects in ways that mediate between economic theory and non economic factors that consultants also seek to accommodate, including their own professional interests, the stakes their clients have in different markets rules, and the technology of electricity.

Significant as the kinds of social knowledge that Jasanoff, Mallard and Lakoff, and Breslau describe have been in the domains of social policy, however, new types of social knowledge have been no less consequential in the private sector, a point that is the motif of the volume’s concluding chapter, chapter 13, where Karin Knorr Cetina carries economic knowledge out of the realm of U.S. regulatory policy and into the international world of high finance. As she does so, her object of investigation becomes social knowledge makers in their capacity as professional financial analysts who work on the trading floors of global banks and elsewhere, advising a diverse range of clients on investment decisions. Conceptualizing financial analysis as an enterprise concerned with the production and use of knowledge in the form of specialized information, Knorr Cetina examines how the practices that constitute the everyday work of professional analysts shape the character—the epistemic features—of this information and stamp upon it certain distinctive properties: namely, high temporal evanescence, strong emotional charge, and close dependence on proxy measures of the economic conditions with which financial research deals. Among these daily practices, Knorr Cetina stresses financial