Science and technology studies and economic sociology
One of the starting points for what might be called the new sociology of technology in the 1980s was a desire to challenge the technological determinism that had characterised earlier sociological and economic accounts of technology (Mackenzie 1996).
Rather than view technical change as an external force that had an impact on society and the economy, sociologists of technology sought to demonstrate the ways in which technology was socially shaped or socially constructed.5 In this account, the economy was understood to be one of a set of factors or forces which influenced the direction of technological change and the design of technological artefacts. In the context of the new sociology of technology Callon and his coauthors took a distinctive and heterodox position. In particular, they argued that the idea that technology was either socially constructed or shaped was problematic for two reasons. First, because the distinction between what was ‘social’ and ‘technical’ and what was ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ was itself disrupted through the process of technical change. Second, because the very idea that the social was something like a structure, environment or context within which technical change occurred was itself problematic (Callon 1987: 100). It was impossible to give a purely ‘social’ explanation of technical change because technical objects (facts, artefacts, devices) themselves form a critical part of what the social is.6 In brief, Callon and his co-authors argued that studies in the sociology of technology demanded a rethinking of the very idea of a social explanation.This argument revolved around two central ideas: the actor-network and translation. First, rather than assume a distinction between the (social) actor and the economic and cultural environment within which the actor and its actions were embedded, Callon and Latour’s approach took the identity of actors as always bound up with the networks of which they were a part.
Instead of speaking of actors and their networks as if they were distinct objects, this approach suggested that it would be more accurate to speak of ‘actor-networks’. Actors were able to have the power to act in so far as they were elements of a network. In effect, the formation of actor-networks generated specific worlds of actors. The identity, capacity and strength of an actor were relational. Moreover, the concept of actornetwork implied a form of material ordering (Law 1994). It described the constitution of a reality forged from heterogeneous elements (materials, texts, bodies, skills, interests, experimental devices) (cf Deleuze 1988). The process of innovation was a process of ‘heterogeneous engineering’.Second, in accounting for the dynamism of actor-networks, Gallon and Latour had earlier adapted Michel Serres' concept of translation (Serres 1974): “By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force” (Gallon and Latour 1981: 279). The notion of translation emphasised the way in which the identity of actors, and their relations, was always in process.7 But it also implied that translation was a political process in which politics was conceived not so much in terms of competing ideologies or interests, but as a calculated Machiavellian act. Seen in these terms, the process of technical change could not be explained by reference to the kinds of social, political and economic interests which determined it. Rather, technical change was itself a form of politics that both revealed and translated the identity of social and economic actors.
What came to be known as actor-network theory was always much more than an approach to the sociology of science and technology. It was offered, rather, as a way of rethinking the very idea of society as a domain distinct from nature and from technical artefacts, and as a way of bypassing the distinction between social structure and agency.
This conceptual apparatus goes to the very heart of what it means to understand economic processes. Economic formalism has been preoccupied with the boundaries of the economic: on the one hand, economic action is treated as occurring within a ‘social context', the multiple ‘exogenous' variables of material environments, given technological capacities, ‘cultures' of needs, tastes, and preferences, social and political ‘impurities' such as intervention in economic processes by governments, custom and tradition and social structures. On the other hand, within the boundaries of the economic, we are to find actors endowed with given capacities - above all, formal rationality, or ‘calculativeness' as Gallon terms it - and forms of social action that emanate from these capacities. Where most economic sociology approaches have simply tried to incorporate the exogenous within economic analysis, actor-network theory treats the constitution of these borders as itself constitutive of the technical assemblages that we come to recognise (and dispute) as ‘economic'. The constitution of rationally calculating actors is not to be understood in terms of either innate capacities or socialisation within an exogenous social context, but as a heterogeneous engineering of assemblages (‘markets') that enlist specific social capacities. This is a technical accomplishment that is, again, a form of political action, requiring the configuration of objects, relationships, methodologies and knowledges into actor-networks that are identifiable as a specific form of social action and structure.Within this overall approach we can identify at least four specific points of contact between science and technology studies (STS) and economic sociology that have been particularly discussed.
First, and most obvious is the phenomenon of technical change itself. Technology, after all, is one of the few real ‘social factors' to impinge seriously on the hermetic models of formal economic thought. There is an important tradition of work on the political economy of innovation, from Smith and Marx to Schumpeter and his followers that addresses the question of the relation between economic and technical change.
For writers within this tradition the direction of technological innovation is not autonomous from the economy. On the contrary, the dynamics of technical change both effect and are influenced by both economic processes and the specificity of national systems of innovation (e.g Mowery and Rosenberg 1998). At a macro-level, Schumpeter developed KondratiefTs notion of long-waves of economic activity associated with revolutionary changes in consumer and producer technologies (Schumpeter 1943: 67-8). At the micro-level, case studies pointed to the role of users as well as producers in the innovation process. In the context of actor-network theory such a conclusion is not surprising: the development of technology will always involve a more or less radical reconfiguration of the identity of those human and non-human actors associated with it.Despite the existence of a substantial literature in the economics of innovation, most conventional economics - as well as most recent discussions of the ‘new economy’ - treat technology simply as an exogenous variable, and (partly for this reason) have been dominated by forms of technological determinism. In the case of ‘new economy’ (to which we return later in this introduction), although claims are constantly made about revolutions in the material basis of production, distribution and consumption, the underlying relationship that is posited between technology and economy is structurally unchanged: technological objects, conceived as independent variables, transform ‘society’ in ways that have then to be captured within formal models of the flow of economic values.
At one level, sociologists and anthropologists of science and technology have introduced into the analysis of economic processes a framework that fundamentally deconstructs both the ‘independent’ and ‘determining’ character of technology. The relation between technology and economy is a subset of the ‘technology and society’ problematic which actor-network approaches have systematically destabilised.
However - and this is the second point of contact between economic sociology and STS - the impact of this work immediately goes beyond the specific issue of technology. Economic processes can themselves be treated as just another kind of agencement,s like cars or nuclear physics (or, indeed, religion or art as a set of technical practices; cf Gell 1998), comprising heterogeneous actors whose properties emerge from specific but contested material arrangements. Economics is just one of the many elements within these arrangements, shouting for attention along with all the rest. In socio-technical studies, actor-network theory aimed both to open the ‘black box’ of the object, and to demonstrate how the constitution of objects could be accounted for by the way in which actors open and close them; in the case of economic objects, and the economy as an object, the issue, again, is how they are defined and contested at their boundaries, how they are internally formatted by being separated out. As Donald Mackenzie argues, such an approach is potentially a very demanding one. It may involve economic sociologists understanding much more about the technical details of economic and financial analysis than they have hitherto:The flowering in the last thirty years of the sociology of science began when it started to open the ‘black box’ of scientific knowledge, the contents of which had previously been held not to be an appropriate subject matter for the sociologist.... the continued flowering of economic sociology will require a similar opening of the black boxes of the economy.
(Mackenzie 2003: 353-4)
Mackenzie demonstrates the fruitfulness of paying close attention to the technical detail of economic knowledge in his study of the sociology of arbitrage. As he shows, financial markets are “not an imperfectly insulated sphere of economic rationality, but a sphere in which the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ interweave seamlessly” (Mackenzie 2003: 373).
Third, this position seeks to cut across the distinction between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ levels of analysis.
The emphasis is on case studies, although these are as far from the form of case study typically to be found in economics and management studies as they are from formalist economic analysis. The empirical examples addressed by this perspective (whether of economic processes or technoscience) are not placed in the context of a structural analysis. Rather they investigate the formation of economic realities through contingent, heterogeneous and local processes. The question of how contingent, or how local or global, particular economic forms are, is a matter for empirical investigation. There is a similarity here between Callon’s approach and Karin Knorr-Cetina’s (1997; Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2000; Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2000; Mackenzie 2003) work on financial markets or Viviana Zelizer’s (1997, 1998) on money, localised constructions of economic processes are accorded a primacy that is in profound conflict with, for example, the structural analyses of political economy. Knorr-Cetina’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how it is possible to understand a global market through a microsocial analysis of particular localised work practices. In particular, she points to the critical importance of the socio-technical arrangement of this market, which is constituted not so much through the network as through the traders’ screens. As she argues: “the screen ‘appresents’ the market, it brings the territorially distant and invisible near to participants, rendering it interactionally and response present” (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2002b: 392).A fourth point of contact between science and technology studies and economic sociology concerns the importance of metrology and calculation. First, metrology itself creates new objects (Latour 1999). Metrological practices (such as those associated with quality control, financial analysis, audit or environmental monitoring) do not just reflect reality as it is. They create new realities (calculable objects) that can, in turn, be the object of economic calculation (Miller 1992). In principle, as sociologists have long argued, measurement tends to function as an ‘anti-political’ device: it reduces the space of possible political contestation. In practice, metrological and calculative practices may serve to open up new objects to political reflection and contestation (Barry, this volume). Second, calculations are always, in principle, contestable. Calculations effect a certain rationalisation of social and economic relations but the extent of this rationalisation should not be overestimated. “As AST came to admit for the natural sciences, there is no reason to imagine an end to these debates and controversies; [there is] no theory or concept that can provide a final solution” (Callon 1998a: 29). Third, calculation is both a technical and ethical practice. It is not something that agents are naturally able to do once markets are formed. Rather, the capacity to calculate depends on a set of technical devices and discursive idioms that make calculation possible. In the case of markets, ‘calculativeness’ depends upon the separation or individualisation of objects into discrete transactable entities, with (temporarily) stabilised properties, that can be placed within a frame of calculation. In the case of markets, this material reality includes legal inscriptions (of contract and ownership); spatiotemporal arrangements (institutional and architectural structures that separate out buyers, sellers and goods as discrete and independent); regulatory institutions that govern the form, shape and circulation of objects; as well as metrological devices that stabilise accounts of their properties.
Such an approach is not individualistic, nor psychologistic. “From the fact that calculations are made in the quasi-laboratories of calculative agencies (the word agent places too much emphasis on the individual) we should not infer that there are calculative beings, no matter how well or poorly informed they may be” (Callon 1998a: 4-5, our emphasis). Despite criticisms that his work is complicit with mainstream economics (in assuming that ‘economic man’ exists) it is clear that Callon’s notion of economic calculation is very different. In the anthropology of science and technology, as understood by Callon, a laboratory is a place within which it may be possible for scientists to establish a distinction between facts about particular material objects and the complexity of the relations within which they are ordinarily entangled - that is, to disentangle a network. Scientists could not possibly achieve such a work of purification using their rational minds alone. They achieve it imperfectly, deploying a vast range of resources, material devices, calculating instruments, personal relationships and so on. Likewise, as the image of ‘quasi-laboratories of calculation’ suggests, economic calculation is not performed by isolated rational individuals but by complex socio-material arrangements in which humans may or may not be entangled (Law 1991: 183; Callon 1998b: 16).9