ABSTRACT
While serving as Editor of the journal Social Studies of Science from 2002 to 2012, I read nearly 2000 submissions. I also was active with the Society for Social Studies of Science, and with one of the leading departments in the fi eld. 1 These experiences, as well as my own research, provide an opportunity to refl ect on the question that contributors to this volume were asked to address: How the so-called “practice turn” in philosophy of science has modifi ed both our conception of science and the way in which we analyze it. 2
Although I have been privileged to read a substantial amount of recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) that virtually nobody else has read-or would want to read-my perspective on the question about the practice turn is no doubt skewed in certain respects. The journal Social Studies of Science, and STS generally, is not closely tied to current trends in philosophy of science, though STS itself has developed its own philosophical orientations and undergone its own version of the practice turn. A further caveat is that, as a journal editor, I read one paper at a time and not as part of a systematic theoretical survey of trends in the fi eld. As a gatekeeper who ended up rejecting most of what passed through the gate, I could be accused (and occasionally was accused) of resisting emergent trends rather than facilitating them. For the most part, this paper relies upon my unsystematic impressions, though it mentions some aggregate trends available from the journal’s log of download and citation statistics. Finally, aside from my editorial experience, my refl ections on the theme of practice have a particular slant, due to the fact that I came to STS from the sociological fi eld of ethnomethodology-a fi eld that did not need to undergo a turn toward practice, because practical action and practical reasoning had been ethnomethodology’s central phenomena for decades, going back to the 1960s, when Harold Garfi nkel publicly launched the fi eld. 3
I think many of my colleagues in STS would view the practice turn, which was prominent in the 1990s, as an important phase in the history of the
fi eld. Two edited volumes bracket the peak of this phase: Pickering (1992) and Schatzki et al. (2001). During that decade, the practice turn was marked as a development from social constructionism. 4 Since then, practice and practices have remained on the agenda, but they are no longer emblematic of the latest trends and turns. Various candidates for successor turns have presented themselves-turns toward culture, ontology, and performativity, among others. There is also a widespread move towards political engagement, sometimes in opposition to “neoliberalism” at both local and global levels (see, for example, Lave, Mirowski, & Randalls, 2010), and more generally there has been an increase in enthusiasm for normative engagement in controversies about science, technology, and medicine. This normative turn is supported by criticisms of the (apparently) disinterested historical and social orientation to technical controversies associated with the sociology of scientifi c knowledge (Winner, 1993; Woodhouse, Hess, Breyman, & Martin, 2002). Such turns often seem to produce old (and not necessarily well-aged) wine in new bottles, but almost invariably they are introduced as bold moves to succeed, or partly undo, allegedly dominant orientations in the fi eld-particularly the orientations toward relativist, constructionist, descriptivist, “micro” treatments of scientifi c practice which became notable, and widely debated, starting in the 1970s-exemplifi ed by works such as Bloor (1976/1991, 1981), Latour and Woolgar (1979), and Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (1983b). Calls for normative and activist engagement have been quite successful in attracting adherents among the PhD students and younger scholars who submit most of the articles received by Social Studies of Science. The turn to practice is by no means complete, however, and practice remains on the agenda, although another keyword-expertise —has absorbed much of the more recent interest and debate in STS.
