STS as Method1 John Law Department of Sociology, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK,
[email protected]. 24th June 2015; Method20150624.doc 1 For comment, discussion and advice I am grateful to Wiebe Bijker, Ivan da Costa Marques, Ulrike Felt, Bernd Kraeftner, Judith Kroell, Marianne Lien, Maureen McNeil, Annemarie Mol, Lucy Suchman and Claire Waterton. Introduction How do science and technology shape the world? Or medicine and engineering? And how does the world in turn shape them? These are core questions for STS, and its authors tackle them by asking how science (and technology and the rest) work in practice. They work, that is, on the assumption that what they often call ‘technoscience’ is a set of social and material practices. Then they note that those practices work in different ways in different locations. So STS authors talk about laboratories, firms and hospitals, and also (since STS interests are wide) about financial traders, farms, care homes and indigenous knowledge practices. They look at how theories, methods, and material pieces of equipment are used in practice in specific social, organisational, cultural and national contexts – and they look at the effects of those practices. So the first lesson is this: STS attends to practices, and it is practical itself. The second lesson follows from this. STS works through its case-studies. If you want to understand STS you need to read it through its cases. How fisherman and scallops interact in practice. How engineers and military chiefs create a warplane. How work in a laboratory generates new theories about physical forces.