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Conference co-sponsored by the Society for the Social History of Medicine and the British Society for the History of Science

THE MEANINGS OF PRACTICE:

historical and sociological perspectives on the practices of science, technology and medicine

Manchester
Friday, November 14, 1997

Speakers include: Marc Berg, Harry Collins, Nick Hopwood, Michael Lynch, Paolo Palladino, John Pickstone, Steven Turner, Andrew Warwick

In recent years, the term 'practice' has been widely adopted by historians and sociologists of science, technology, and medicine to address a number of historiographical and sociological problems. These problems range from the importance of intellectual developments in the history of science, technology and medicine, to the relationship between social structures and human agency in social theory. The notions of 'practice' deployed to solve them seem to vary widely from one context to another, from the marxist, materialist notion of 'praxis' implicit in much work of social historians to the notion of 'world in the making' articulated by ethnomethodologists. Although both historians and sociologists often borrow and combine these notions to solve their particular problems, it is not always clear that they can combined so freely. In fact, some of these historians and sociologists are quite critical about some notions rather than others. The aim of the meeting is to highlight this diversity, without necessarily seeking, probably impossibly, to establish a single meaning of 'practice'. It might be more fruitful, instead, to consider the relationships between the diverse meanings by bringing together historians of sociologists and asking them to reflect and comment upon this diversity and the reasons for divergence. Pluralism is a good thing, but it does not invalidate criticism.

INTRODUCTION

Paolo Palladino (Lancaster University)

SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES:

Chair: Chris Lawrence (Wellcome Institute)

Michael Lynch (Brunel University)
INVESTIGATING PRACTICES, AS SUCH
Practice has a curious attraction for social theory. Talk about practice (or practices) invites us to consider a productive source of social order that is not, in itself, theoretical. Invariably, however, theorized practices lose their practicality, and practice becomes an abstraction. Is there any alternative to intellectualizing practice? Drawing selectively on ethnomethodology, I suggest that there is an alternative to talking about practices. This alternative requires an effort to bring practices under examination in the course of their production.

Harry Collins (University of Southampton)
THEORETICAL PRACTICE
In the field of gravitational wave detection there is competition between big physics and small physics approaches, interferometers and resonant bars and spheres. Given the experimenter's regress, and the fact that no gravitational waves have yet been detected, one might wonder how a $3M approach can coexist with a $350M approach, how the latter got funded. I will argue that part of the reason is that the big science of inteferometers was legitimated in part by theoretical practice: the best theories we have for sources of gravitational waves concern coalescing binary stars. These may not be the most likely source but they are the most well-established.

Marc Berg (University of Limburg)
PRACTICES OF READING AND WRITING: A SOCIOLOGY OF THE ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD
In this presentation, I discuss how we can see technologies as integrated in/part of/constitutive for a social practice. More specifically, I will discuss how the (electronic) medical record is an active intermediary in the practices of medicine. I will focus on the crucial role this seemingly boring artefact plays, and on how we can study this role. 'Practice', here, is taken in its productive sense: practices of reading and writing bring the medical record to life; through practices of reading and writing, the medical record produces specific patients' bodies, a specific body politic, and a specific body of knowledge.

The historian's comments: Jon Harwood (University of Manchester):

HISTORICAL APPROACHES:

Chair: Jon Agar (University of Manchester)

John Pickstone (University of Manchester)
WORKING WITH WEBER: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, MEDICINE AND THE PLURALITY OF PRACTICES
'Practice' is too often a licence for a new empiricism, for case-studies of a 'science' differentiated neither by place/time nor the structure of the work involved. I suggest we try to distinguish types of practice in science, technology, and medicine (as we would eg. for manufacturing). Thus we might improve our modelling of historical change in science, technology, and medicine, and our accounts of synchronic variety, including contested divisions of labour. I will argue that such modelling need not be teleological or intellectualist, but rather a means of integrating cognitive, social and material perspectives.

Andrew Warwick (Imperial College)
A MATHEMATICAL WORLD ON PAPER?
Historians and philosophers of physics have traditionally sought meaning in physical theories of the past by reconstructing their essential ideas, sometimes expressed in mathematical form, as described by authors in published texts. Such theories are generally treated as passive and unchanging entities, whose meaning can be described without reference to the community in which they were actively researched, and whose truth content can be assessed, retrospectively, in terms of their logical structure and/or predictive accuracy. In this paper I shall discuss research in mathematical physics not in terms of static 'theories', but as an ongoing, participatory activity, through which a local community of actors finds cultural meaning and status. Taking the example of research in mathematical physics in Victorian Cambridge, I shall show how research can be analysed as a repertoire of taken-for-granted mathematical methods, and discuss how such methods rely for their reproduction and transmission on a local economy of institutionalised practice. I shall also consider through what resources, and to what extent, this kind of historically placed practice can be recovered at all.

Nick Hopwood (Cambridge University)
PRACTICES AND PRACTICE IN THE HISTORY OF EMBRYOLOGY
Historical studies of the biological and biomedical sciences deploy the notion of 'practice' in two limiting, but not necessarily exclusive, ways. In the first, 'practices' are particular activities, general such as experimental practice or clinical practice, or specific like plasmid mini preps or tissue transplantation. Materialists have traditionally privileged such practices as standing in a similar relation to theory as eating to puddings. In its second and much more general meaning, 'practice' signals a dynamic analytic stance, in which any aspect of the science under study, be it testing, theorizing or teaching, should be grasped as creative action on material. I plan to explore these contrasting uses in a case study from the history of embryology.

The sociologist's comments: Steve Woolgar (Brunel University)

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Steven Turner (University of Florida)

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THE MEANINGS OF PRACTICE:

historical and sociological perspectives on the practices of science, technology and medicine

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