ABSTRACT

In order to understand the relevance of a social science approach to biomedicine, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will give a short outline of what I understand to be the crucial features of a social science perspective, and I will show how a social science perspective and the interdisciplinary approach of science and technology studies (STS) can be involved in a fruitful discussion beyond the established lines of the Bloor-Latour debates. It is one of the main questions within these debates whether, next to human beings, other entities can be social actors, too.1 I will argue that sociological theory is implicitly less focused on human actors than Bloor suggested. Furthermore, I suggest that an analysis of how the actor status is distributed can profi t from a sociological perspective. Second, I will describe why the analysis of biomedicine is important to scholars in the social sciences by introducing the concept of “biomedical border regimes.”