Received: 5 February 2020 | Accepted: 11 February 2020 DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12746 SPECIAL ISSUE Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing Noortje Marres1 | David Stark1,2 1University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom Abstract 2Columbia University, New York, NY In an age defined by computational innovation, testing seems to have become ubiquitous, and tests are routinely deployed Correspondence Noortje Marres, Centre for Interdisciplinary as a form of governance, a marketing device, an instrument Methodologies, University of Warwick, for political intervention, and an everyday practice to evalu- Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. Email:
[email protected] ate the self. This essay argues that something more radical is happening here than simply attempts to move tests from Funding information H2020 European Research Council, the laboratory into social settings. The challenge that a new Grant/Award Number: 695256 sociology of testing must address is that ubiquitous testing changes the relations between science, engineering, and soci- ology: Engineering is today in the very stuff of where society happens. It is not that the tests of 21st-century engineering occur within a social context but that it is the very fabric of the social that is being put to the test. To understand how testing and the social relate today, we must investigate how testing operates on social life, through the modification of its settings. One way to clarify the difference is to say that the new forms of testing can be captured neither within the logic of the field test nor of the controlled experiment. Whereas tests once happened inside social environments, today’s tests directly and deliberately modify the social environment.