A Socio-logy of Monsters ESSAYS ON POWER, TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINATION SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW MONOGRAPH 38 A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination The Sociological Review Managing editors: John Eggleston, Ronald Frankenberg and Gordon Fyfe University of Keele Editorial board P. Bourdieu D. Jary Centre de Sociologie Europkene, Staffordshire Polytechnic Paris J. Law S. Cohen University of Keele Hebrew University, Jerusalem S. Macintyre MRC Medical Sociology Unit, Glasgow R. Deem Open University U.M. Sharma University of Keele S. Delamont University College, Cardiff D. Smith University of Aston S. Dex University of Keele M. Strathern University of Manchester S.J. Eggleston University of Warwick S. L. Star University of Keele R.J. Frankenberg University of Keele B.S. Turner University of Essex G. Fyfe W.M. Williams C.B.E. University of Keele University College, Swansea M. Harrison [Chairman] University of Keele SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW MONOGRAPH 38 A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination Edited by John Law London and New York First published in I991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Set in Times by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd and printed in Great Britain by Page Bros (Norwich) Ltd KJ KJ The Sociological Review 1991 No part of this book may be reproduced in in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available ISBN 0-415-07139-9 Contents Notes on contributors Introduction: monsters, John Law machines and sociotechnical relations Distributions of power Power, technologies and the Susan Leigh Star phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions Configuring the user: the case of Steve Woolgar usability trials Materials of power Technology is society made Bruno Latour durable Techno-economic networks and Michel Callon irreversibility Strategies of power Power, discretion and strategy John Law Advanced manufacturing Juliet Webster technologies: work organisation and social relations crystallised Power, technology and flexibility Stewart Clegg and in organizations Fiona Wilson Notes on contributors John Law is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Technological and Organisational Practice at the University of Keele. He has published widely in the social analysis of science, technology, and power, and his recent research interests include management and organisational ethnography, the history of military aviation, methods for mapping scientific and technical change, and the character of performance indicators. Susan Leigh Star is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Keele. She is the author of Regions of the Mind (Stanford University Press, 1989), and numerous articles on the sociology of science, work and technology. She is co-editor of a new Journal, CSCW: the International Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and a member of the Council of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4s). Steve Woolgar is Reader in Sociology and Director of CRICT (The Centre for Research into Innovation Culture and Technology) at Brunel, University of West London. He is author of Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts (with Bruno Latour) and Science: the very idea; and editor of Knowledge and Reflexivity; Representation in Scientific Practice (with Michael Lynch); The Cognitive Turn: social and psychological perspectives on science (with Steve Fuller and Marc de Mey); and Social Perspectives on Software (with Fergus Murray). He is currently working on a series of projects exploring the textual and reflexive dimensions of computing and information technology. Bruno Latour is Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de I'Innovation, Paris, and at Science Studies, UCSD, San Diego. Notes on contributors He has published several books and many articles on the sociology, history and philosophy of science and technology. His latest book Aramis or the Love of Technology (to be published by Harvard University Press) is a thorough study of an automated subway project in Paris. He is currently working on a book on non- modernity. Michel Callon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre de Sociologie de 171nnovationat the Ecole Nationale SupCrieure des Mines. He has published widely in the sociology of science and technology, the sociology of translation, and the economics of research and development. He is the co-editor of Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology, and has pioneered a range of techniques for describing scientific and technical change, including the co-word method. Juliet Webster is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research Centre for Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are in the areas of the social shaping of technologies, the technologylwork organisation relationship, and gender issues in technological implementation. She is the author of Office Automa- tion: the Labour Process and Women's Work in Britain (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Stewart Clegg, formerly Professor of Sociology at the University of New England, Armidale, is now Professor of Organization Studies in the Department of Management, University of St Andrews. Before coming to Scotland, Stewart had worked in Australia for more than a decade. Fiona Wilson is a lecturer in Organizational Behaviour in the Department of Management, University of St Andrews. Before beginning her teaching career, she was a Research Fellow at Manchester Business School (where she gained her doctorate) and Bradford University Management Centre. Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations1 John Law I said 'I think they might also be what are called "hopeful monsters".' She said 'What are hopeful monsters?' I said 'They are things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them.' Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters, p. 71 Introduction We founded ourselves on class; then, at a much later date we learned a little about ethnicity; more recently we discovered gender; and more recently still we learned something - perhaps not very much yet - about age and disability. So might a white, middle class, middle aged man with a normatively approved set of physical skills write of the history of his sociology. So might he comment on the way in which he slowly learned that 'his' sociology had never spoken for 'us': that all along the sociological 'we' was a Leviathan that had achieved its (sense of) order by usurping or silencing the other voices. Even so, this was a sociology always driven, at least in part, by a concern with distribution - for otherwise it would never have learned of its isolation. It was driven by a concern with pain. It was driven by an ambivalent wish to learn of and intervene about injustice. But what should count as a distribution was fought over time and time again in the retreat from a sovereign order. 'We' found it difficult to recognise class - for after all, we are all free and equal in the market. And ethnicity, too, was slow to come into focus, perhaps because it was hoped that this was underpinned by a logic of class. Then those who took class seriously - and, to be sure, those who did not - found it difficult to recognise gender. Where 'we' are now, gender is somewhat, but only somewhat, in John Law focus. Still there are great silences about gender. As there are about age, about disability. Something like this seems to happen: first the dispossessed have no voice at all. Then, when they start to create a voice, they are derided. Then (I am not sure of the order), they are told that they are wrong, or they are told that this was something that everyone knew all along. Then they are told that they are a danger. Then finally, in a very partial form, it may be that their voices are heard and taken seriously. And it has been a struggle all the way. There are several reasons for introducing a volume on technology and power by talking, like this, of the birth of pain in sociology, the discovery of distributions. But the most pressing grows out of what I take to be a great divide between the critical sociological concern with distribution on the one hand, and much of the most important new writing on science and technology on the other. It is easy to characterise that divide, though I find it hard to characterise it well. In one version, however, it amounts to a reciprocal accusation of myopia between sociology and what (for purposes of brevity) I will call STS (science, technology and society). I have a foot in both camps, so let me say, tout court, that much of the best work in STS is indeed more or less blind to the great distributions, the pains, sought out by, pressed on, and more or less hesitantly described in sociology. There is work - mainly feminist and from the labour process tradition - for which this is not the case. But much of STS is not, or at any rate has not been, driven by a concern for dispossession. This is the charge, a charge detailed by a range of more politically committed critics; that many writers in STS have had little to say about class, race, or gender.2 And, as I have indicated, I think it is (at least partly) guilty. So what has gone wrong? There is one contingency: STS is very small. Compared with the great factories of sociology, it is a cottage industry. Truly, we have not been able to do everything at once. But this is in passing. What of the substance? The truth of the matter, of course, is that many writers in STS think that nothing has gone wrong. In part this is because, since the 1960s, STS has been wrestling with its own problems. Those problems and their solutions (partial and contentious though they may be) are very important.