This paper explores models of reflexive feminist science studies through the work of Donna Haraway. The paper argues that Haraway provides an important account of science studies that is both feminist and constructivist. However, her concepts of “situated knowledges” and “diffraction” need further development to be adequate models of feminist science studies. To develop this constructivist and feminist project requires a collective research program that engages with feminist reflexivity as a practice.

Epistemology, a branch of philosophy, examines and contributes as a theory of knowledge by considering the nature and definition of knowledge as being truth within certain limitations while ontology defines the nature of being, entities that can exist and their categories in groups, hierarchies, or divisions. The main aim of this paper is to embrace on the pre-understanding of epistemology and ontology, regardless of their schools of thought as it will provide them the proper guidance and a philosophical dualist perspective. (...) Four domains of epistemic assumptions have been identified but one is incoherent due to the mismatch between epistemology and ontology. Though each epistemic assumption has its own interpretation in management research, there is no particular domain that can be considered right or wrong, perfect or imperfect. A proper and effective research design is the major concern in management research, where the researcher’s epistemic and methodological self-directed actions or reflexivity may put an essence in it. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

Relativism in psychology unravels the truth-claims and oppressive\npractices of the discipline, but simply relativizing psychological knowledge\nhas not been sufficient to comprehend and combat the discipline\nas part of the ‘psy-complex’. For that, a balanced review of the contribution\nand problems of relativism needs to work dialectically, and so\nthis article reviews four problematic rhetorical balancing strategies in\nrelativism before turning to the contribution of critical realism. Critical\nrealism exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself\non what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds (...) discursive\naccounts of mentation in social practices. The problem is that those\nsympathetic to mainstream psychology are also appealing to ‘realism’\nto warrant it as a science and to discredit critical research that situates\npsychological phenomena. Our use of critical realism calls for an\naccount of how psychological facts are socially constructed within\npresent social arrangements and for an analysis of the underlying historical\nconditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex’. Only by understanding\nhow the discipline of psychology reproduces notions of\nindividuality and human nature, a critical realist endeavour, will it be\npossible to transform it, and to socially construct it as something different. (shrink)

The classical conception of rhetoric as the method of reasoned political judgment survived into the Renaissance but was reduced to academic critiques of style and "empty" public rhetoric with the rise of modern science and its representationalist theories of language. Recently, however, rhetoric, textuality, and the "linguistic turn" generally, have become central metaphors in the human sciences. This renewed rhetorical perspective not only fosters a critique of positive philosophy and of scientism in public discourse, it also offers affirmative methods by (...) which persons can construct their civic lives. (shrink)

In this essay several virtues are discussed that are needed in people who work in participatory design (PD). The term PD is used here to refer specifically to an approach in designing information systems with its roots in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s. Through the lens of virtue ethics and based on key texts in PD, the virtues of cooperation, curiosity, creativity, empowerment and reflexivity are discussed. Cooperation helps people in PD projects to engage in cooperative curiosity and cooperative (...) creativity. Curiosity helps them to empathize with others and their experiences, and to engage in joint learning. Creativity helps them to envision, try out and materialize ideas, and to jointly create new products and services. Empowerment helps them to share power and to enable other people to flourish. Moreover, reflexivity helps them to perceive and to modify their own thoughts, feelings and actions. In the spirit of virtue ethics—which focuses on specific people in concrete situations—several examples from one PD project are provided. Virtue ethics is likely to appeal to people in PD projects because it is practice-oriented, provides room for exploration and experimentation, and promotes professional and personal development. In closing, some ideas for practical application, for education and for further research are discussed. (shrink)

A growing body of knowledge within the social sciences is produced from the perspectives of marginalised groups of people, and often, western science is criticised as an accomplice in a male-dominated and/or Eurocentric hegemony where alternative voices are excluded. This article investigates the terms of debate of this kind of knowledge in the social scientific community: who can partake in this discussion, and with which kind of commitment? The empirical material is the reviews of Linda Tuhiwai Smith?s book Decolonizing methodologies. (...) Research and indigenous peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999). Most of the reviewers welcome Smith's critique of western science and call for a more inclusive alternative. The question of the analysis is how this ambition is put to practice. The analysis demonstrates that even if the reviewers condone Smith's project, many of them hesitate to fully enter the debate. Many reviews oscillate between a classical understanding of culture and a postmodernist approach. The article argues that an unaddressed tension between these patterns of thought leaves the reviewers at an impasse. A crucial point is how we conceptualise the relationship between knowledge and context, and the author suggests that Sandra Harding's version of standpoint theory may help us to reconsider the terms of the debate. (shrink)

(1998). The idea of the university in the global era: From knowledge as an end to the end of knowledge? Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, Sites of Knowledge Production: The University, pp. 3-25. doi: 10.1080/02691729808578856.

Steve Fuller's social epistemology aims to integrate the philosophy of science and sociology of science, and to enhance the ability of these disciplines to contribute to science policy. While applauding the re?vitalizing energy of the enterprise, a sociological perspective requires attention to four key aspects of the programme. First, the character of interdisciplinarity requires careful specification, lest the critical dynamic of social studies of science be compromised by calls to pluralism. Second, social epistemology can and should transcend the traditional epistemological (...) attribution of positions ('positionism') to protagonists. Third, the argumentative dynamic of social studies of science, which enables the successive reconceptualization of ?epistemic? matters, suggests some problems for social epistemology's use of ?sociological results?. Finally, social epistemology requires a more sociologically informed understanding of what in practice counts as normative research, since the current programme trades upon unexamined conceptions of policy audience. (shrink)

During the past hundred years or so, those scholars studying science have isolated themselves as much as possible from scientists as well as from workers in other disciplines who study science. The result of this effort is history of science, philosophy of science and sociology of science as separate disciplines. I argue in this paper that now is the time for these disciplinary boundaries to be lowered or at least made more permeable so that a unified discipline of Science Studies (...) might emerge. I discuss representative problems that stand in the way of such an integration. These problems may seem so formidable in the abstract that no one in their right mind would waste their time trying to bring about a unified field of Science Studies. However, those of us who limit ourselves to the study of the biological sciences have already formed a society in which workers from all disciplines can share their expertise -- the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to begin to try to understand the extent to which ethnomethodology (EM) might be informed by some concepts and ideas from the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This is done in two parts. The first looks at Heidegger's later work and compares his conception of the ontological difference with Garfinkel's work on the difference between EM and formal sociological analysis (FA). The second part turns to Heidegger's earlier work (around Being and Time) and (...) works through a number of affinities between the analysis of Dasein and ethnomethodological versions of everydayness. (shrink)

: This paper explores models of reflexive feminist science studies through the work of Donna Haraway. The paper argues that Haraway provides an important account of science studies that is both feminist and constructivist. However, her concepts of "situated knowledges" and "diffraction" need further development to be adequate models of feminist science studies. To develop this constructivist and feminist project requires a collective research program that engages with feminist reflexivity as a practice.

Population ageing and increased digitalization each constitute an ongoing and profound transformation within contemporary modes of living, as growing advances in technological development mix and intermingle with the lived realities of older people as the final recipients. It is against the backdrop of this interplay that user involvement has enjoyed ever-rising advocacy to an almost normative degree. Beyond articulating methodological principles, however, the literature has remained surprisingly vague as to the practical implementation of the approach. Less appears to be known, (...) both empirically and conceptually, about how design and user involvement are done in practice and how they would matter to bring about intentional or unintentional effects. To engage with these developments, this thesis aims at taking the practices of user involvement and design to the centre of its inquiry by adopting a perspective from Science and Technology Studies. Specifically, the thesis seeks to both build on and contribute to the established body of STS on the connection between technology design and older users and ask: What is there to learn about user involvement as a method, if we focus on the practices of doing user involvement? To answer this question, the thesis studies four different aspects of the practices of user involvement and design. In particular, the thesis reviews the literature on how user involvement mattered in previous empirical projects that include older people, it examines how different configurations of participation matter in design workshops, it scrutinizes the achievement of user involvement in corporate practices and it traces the circumstantial performances of such practices. The largest empirical piece comes from a two-year ethnographic study of a small- to medium-sized enterprise, the material from which informed Paper III and Paper IV. The findings highlight how user involvement in practice is both contingent and transformative, as it selectively enrols different participants and performs multiple realities. In practice, user involvement appears to be dependent on a set of underlying premises and socio-material conditions and thus is always a dynamic and momentary achievement. Furthermore, the thesis shows how the practices of user involvement themselves may bring into existence different realities, articulating and materializing particular versions of objects and images of ageing. Accordingly, the thesis contributes theoretically by illuminating the underlying socio-material facets of user involvement, and by emphasizing ageing as a particular object/image of design. Specifically, the appended papers encompass a conceptual framework, as well as three new concepts: design multiple, shifting interstices and viscous image landscape, in order to theorize the underlying conditions for user involvement, its relationship with design and its entanglement with ageing. Practically, the thesis enunciates three main implications regarding questions of goodness, politics and ethics. (shrink)

Most literature about vaccine hesitancy has been focused on parental attitudes. Less attention has been devoted to both scientists and experts who raise criticism about immunization policies and intervene in the public debate. This consideration aims to balance the current emphasis in the literature on parents’ attitudes about vaccination, offering a complementary angle to reframe and widen the controversy. Focusing on scientists and experts, an unattended complex picture of multiple attitudes towards vaccines and vaccinations has been discovered through a qualitative (...) content analysis of texts related to the harsh public debate, held between March 2017 and November 2018, triggered by the legislative proposal of making ten vaccinations mandatory for children. Unlike oversemplications that misleading dichotomies reproduce, the analysis reveals nine different positions along the continuum of immunisation attitudes, ranging from radical acceptance of vaccinations to radical rejection, which constitute a fuzzy set. Consequently, a twofold reality emerges: on the surface, the conflict seems between pro-vaxxers versus hesitant, pro-choice and anti-vaxxers; beneath it is amid standardized versus a varieties of contextual and personalised approaches to health. (shrink)

Contemporary social theory has consistently emphasized habitual action, rule-following, and role-performing as key aspects of social life, yet the challenge remains of combining these aspects with the omnipresent phenomenon of self-reflective conduct. This article attempts to tackle this challenge by proposing useful distinctions that can facilitate further interdisciplinary research on self-reflection. To this end, I argue that we need a more sophisticated set of distinctions and categories in our understanding of habitual action. The analysis casts light on the idea that (...) our contemporary social theories of self-reflection are not consistent with everyday notions of agential knowledgeability and accountability, and this conclusion indicates the need to reconceptualize discourse and subjectivity in non-eliminative terms. Ultimately, the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity turns out to be a theoretical necessity for the conceptualization of discursive participation and democratic choice. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the origins and subsequent reception of the paper "Ontological Gerrymandering: The anatomy of social problems explanations", published in 1985. It describes the circumstances of my turning up at McGill University as a Visiting Professor in Sociology and meeting Dorothy, then a graduate student and the TA assigned to an undergraduate course on Social Problems which I was asked to teach. The paper reflects on the twin benefits: of an interloper, from Europe and from Science and Technology (...) Studies (STS), entering the exotic and heady fray of North American social problems; and of Dorothys steady and resolute guidance in introducing me to a new field. The paper suggests some reasons for the endurance of the papers arguments, more than 35 years after its publication, drawing on some parallel developments in Social Problems and STS. It asks why has there been rather little mutual interaction between these disciplines, given their common concern with questions, among others, about values, effects and interventions in academic scholarship. The paper concludes that many more of us might have done well to pursue the path of strident agnosticism. (shrink)

In this article, the impact of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the sociology of science is evaluated. The main argument is that a questionable construction of Kuhn’s work heralded the constructivist revolution that ultimately contributed to the division between sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge. A reorientation of sociology of science that combines institutional and constructivist perspectives is advocated.

This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed—relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second point of the article is to argue that present technology studies are now able to break away from (...) a too academic, internalistic perspective and return to the politically relevant "Science, Technology & Society" issues that informed much of this work more than a decade ago. (shrink)

Actor-network theory has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANT’s development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity (...) to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANT’s current theoretical discontent. (shrink)

Contemporary design practices, such as participatory design, human-centered design, and codesign, have inherent ethical qualities, which often remain implicit and unexamined. Three design projects in the high-tech industry were studied using three ethical traditions as lenses. Virtue ethics helped to understand cooperation, curiosity, creativity, and empowerment as virtues that people in PD need to cultivate, so that they can engage, for example, in mutual learning and collaborative prototyping. Ethics of alterity helped to understand human-centered design as a fragile encounter between (...) project team members and prospective users, and foregrounds the ethics in these encounters: our tendencies to “grasp the other” and to “program invention.” And pragmatist ethics helped to understand codesign as a process of joint inquiry and imagination, involving the organization of iterative processes of problem setting and solution finding, with moral qualities. When we open the “black boxes” of design practices, we find them filled with ethics. Moreover, it is proposed that design practitioners need to make explicit their practices’ inherent ethical qualities and that they can do that by embracing reflexivity. (shrink)

This article analyzes the demarcations made within psychology as a feature of the “memory wars”—the current controversy around “recovered” or “false” memory. As it is played out inside professional psychology, the dispute features clinical practitioners acting largely as proponents of recovered memory and experimentalists as proponents of false memory. Tracing a genealogy of this dispute back to a pair of original sites, we show how the traditions’engagement in three modes of scientific demonstration varies systematically in terms of the modes of (...) social relation inherent in their epistemic practices and the kinds of “reliable witness” these practices produce. We conclude that whereas the experimentalist tradition is able to transporttheir produced witnesses from oneto anothersite of demonstration with relative ease, the clinical tradition has much greater difficulty in doing so and thus has to engage in a variety of compensatory demonstrative strategies. (shrink)

Many efforts to establish concepts and theories of the middle range have sought to find an appropriate balance between theoretical abstraction and the desire to remain faithful to the empirical complexity of phenomenon. As with other forms of expertise, those analyzing socio-technical life face acute tensions in attempting to reconcile the general and the specific in a manner which is regarded as credible. Through a consideration of the self-referential implications of STS critiques of traditional notions of science as well as (...) attempts to establish rules for the acceptability of coercive force, this article develops a sense of what is at stake in attempts by actors and analysts to grasp the general and the specific together. Instead of seeking to identify a point of resolution for the two, it advocates and exemplifies the need to attend to the dilemmas associated with the movement between the general and the specific. The middle range concept of “disposal strategies” is offered both as an aid to the study of socio-technical life and as an example of attending to the movement between the general and specific. (shrink)

This essay explores how the distinctively anthropological concept of culture provides uniquely valuable insights into the workings of science in its cultural context. Recent efforts by anthropologists to dislodge the traditional notion of culture as a homogenous, stable whole have opened up a variety of ways of imagining culture that place power differentials, flux, and contradiction at its center. Including attention to a wide variety of social domains outside the laboratory, attending to the ways nonscientists actively engage with scientific knowledge, (...) and focusing on the complex interactions that flow both into and out of research laboratories are ways the activities of both scientists and nonscientists can be situated in the heterogeneous matrtx of culture. Three images—the citadel, the rhizome, and the string figure—allow us to picture the discontinuous ways science both permeates and is permeated by cultural life. (shrink)

Whereas many constructivist and feminist approaches to the social study of technology share an antipathy to technological tietenninism, they offer an insufficiently radical critique of technolagy. Three main problems in "anti-essentialist" critiques of techno logical determinism are identified, all of which mean that such critiques remain committed to a form of essentialism. These characteristics recur in many recent feminist arguments about technology, illustrated by the example of reproductive technologies. To overcome weaknesses in political radicalism based on anti-essentialism, it is necessary (...) to move to a "past-essentialist" approach. The unwillingness to do so is shown to be based on unfounded objections to "excessive" relativism. (shrink)

This response to a recent article in ST&HV by Woolgar investigates Woolgar's concept of analytic ambivalence. The response points out how this notion originates in a formula applied to social problems research and how this formula is used as the basis for Woolgar's critique of work in the social studies of technology. The response then goes on to show that Woolgar's own application of the formula of analytic ambivalence is formulaic and glosses over many of the interesting features of the (...) social studies of technology. Woolgar's article seems set to become another exemplification of the reflexivist formula rather than an occasion for questioning the idea of applying formulas altogether. (shrink)

The understanding of science by members of the public has been of increasing concern to social scientists. This article argues that such understanding, or the ostensible lack of it, is structured by discourses that address science both as an abstract entity or principle and as an activity directed at specific phenomena or problems. Drawing upon a wide range of interviews about various sources of ionizing radiation, it is suggested that understanding is tied to questions of social identity that encompass relations (...) of differentiation from and identification with science and the institutions in which it is embedded. (shrink)

Researchers in science and technology studies appear to be more concerned with descriptions and explanations of social phenomena than with the potential applications of their findings. Science and technology studies should strive to change society by contributing to the design of learning environments that form future generations of producers and consumers of scientific and technological knowledge. In this article, the authors illustrate how they used research findings from science and technology studies to design alternative learning environments and summarize their principal (...) findings from six years of ethnographic research in these learning environments. They conclude by pointing out some of the caveats inherent in theirapproach and by suggesting areas in science education of interest to science and technology studies. (shrink)

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate around sustainability by proposing the need for an ecocentric stance to sustainability that reflexively embeds humans in—rather than detached from—nature. We argue that this requires a different way of thinking about our relationship with our world, necessitating a engagement with the sociomaterial world in which we live. We develop the notion of ecocentrism by drawing on insights from sociomateriality studies, and show how radical-reflexivity enables us to appreciate our embeddedness and responsibility for (...) sustainability by bringing attention to the interrelationship between values, actions and our social and material world. We examine the implications of an ecocentric radically reflexive approach to sustainability for management education. (shrink)

After decades of epistemological inquiry on the social construction of science, we have observed a renewed consensus on empiricism in application-oriented social sciences and a growing trust in evidence-based practice and decision-making. Drawing on the long-standing debate on value-ladenness, evidence and normativity in sciences, this article theoretically discusses and empirically illustrates the Life-World origins of methods in a domain of inquiry strongly characterized by an empiricist epistemic culture and a normative stance: Children and Media Studies. Adopting a reflexive approach to (...) their own research in such an epistemologically underexplored field, the authors analyze a standard research instrument and two procedures. The analysis illustrates how background assumptions shape the research method and how the procedures routinely conceal this work of shaping. In the discussion the authors cast light on the role scientific procedures play in the naturalization of a given moral order, and put forward the question of whether and how this “morality-building” feature of methods should be taken into account in the assessment of their appropriateness. In the conclusion the authors advance that the situated nature of scientific knowledge, rather than discrediting its relevance, is what makes it relevant, here and now, for the larger community the research may impact on. The authors discuss the risks of such a pragmatic outcome and propose the adoption of an oscillating epistemic stance as a way to cope with them. (shrink)

This article discusses the discourses of disability through a parallel `disabling' of its own text. It draws on literary as well as sociological sources in order to interrogate the nature and relations of the `tragic', the `heroic' and the `comic'. The authors offer the conclusion that the comic is never quite absent from the discourse of tragedy (after Kundera), and turn that insight back on their own text, in an attempt to refuse the solemnities and closures of their own narrative.

Through two exchanges in this journal, a type of relativism has been advanced by a group of authors from Loughborough University with a view to demolishing what they see as ‘bottom line’ arguments for critical realism in the social sciences. Jauntily dismissing realism, they also soberly disown the supposed ‘extreme’ consequences that some realists insist follow naturally from relativist conceptions of social inquiry. In this article, I contest the Loughborough team’s arguments. Their presentation of relativism itself can be reconstructed in (...) at least three different ways, none of which suffices to undermine a generally realist account of explanatory endeavour. The most productive note in the critics’ conceptual register highlights the utility of rhetorical analysis; yet this can proceed effectively only if it is neutral with respect to different epistemic and ontological stances. The most productive thematic possibility raised in their articles, and shared with several other recent discussions, signals that realism and relativism may not be anything like fixed and opposed stances; yet the polemical thrust of their anti-realism compromises this insight. (shrink)

Through two exchanges in this journal, a type of relativism has been advanced by a group of authors from Loughborough University with a view to demolishing what they see as ‘bottom line’ arguments for critical realism in the social sciences. Jauntily dismissing realism, they also soberly disown the supposed ‘extreme’ consequences that some realists insist follow naturally from relativist conceptions of social inquiry. In this article, I contest the Loughborough team’s arguments. Their presentation of relativism itself can be reconstructed in (...) at least three different ways, none of which suffices to undermine a generally realist account of explanatory endeavour. The most productive note in the critics’ conceptual register highlights the utility of rhetorical analysis; yet this can proceed effectively only if it is neutral with respect to different epistemic and ontological stances. The most productive thematic possibility raised in their articles, and shared with several other recent discussions, signals that realism and relativism may not be anything like fixed and opposed stances; yet the polemical thrust of their anti-realism compromises this insight. (shrink)

This paper argues that one can empirically test, via positivist methods, the post-modern attack on positivist epistemologies: Postmodern perspectives hold Knowledge and Truth to be intersubjective, consensus-driven social constructions. But traditional scientific approaches to knowledge, exemplified here by the cognitive social psychology of persuasion, seem oblivious to this and continue to detach the study of attitudes, beliefs, and emotions from that of knowledge, facts, and reason. Abandoning these artificial distinctions in both epistemology and method would enable this social psychology, reconstituted (...) as a Sociology of Persuasion, to contribute greatly to illuminating the processes of Truth and Knowledge construction in social interaction. Moreover, this would facilitate academic engagement in civic discourse. (shrink)

The move to Postmodernism in argumentation is often predicated on the rejection of the formal basis of argument in logic. While this rejection may be justified, and is widely discussed in the literature, the loss of logic creates problems that a Postmodern theory of argument must address without recourse to logic and its attendant modernist assumptions. This essay argues that conceiving of argument in terms ofpractices will address the key problematics of Postmodernism without abandoning those features of argumentation that make (...) it an important social, cultural and political practice. Implications for both theory and pedagogy are discussed. (shrink)