Books Available for Review

Why do innovations tend to ‘explode’ into multiple versions when inventors seek to realize them? Why do most innovators seem to promise too much certainty about the future? And why is it so hard for innovations to succeed in finding use and establish a market?

Thomas Hoholm presents a real-time study of the messy realm of industrial innovation. The complexity and the tensions of industrial innovation processes are fleshed out through the analysis of an intriguing case study from the food industry. By drawing together insights from innovation studies, science and technology studies, and studies of industrial networks, the controversies of innovation are investigated. Particular attention is given to the interaction between the mobilising of actors-networks and the exploration of knowledge, as well as to the interaction among the networks of interconnected processes called ‘industry’.

Through an ethnographic case study of innovation between the biomarine and agricultural industries, Hoholm has followed innovation processes from idea to commercialization. His study adds to our understanding of innovation dynamics, particularly related to path creation, network friction, and the relationships between divergence and convergence in industrial innovation processes. (319 pp.)

Ideas about public engagement with controversial technologies are growing in political prominence. This book delivers a theoretically grounded, empirical analysis of why active public involvement is considered to be of growing importance for the legitimate use of new technologies. It examines the different social dynamics influencing actual attempts to engage the public and the difficulties encountered.

Janus Hansen argues that while there are strong normative reasons to further public engagement with the regulation of controversial technologies, there are also strong sociological reasons to reflect carefully on what such engagement can realistically achieve. This book delivers conceptual tools and empirical analyses to support such reflections based on in-depth case studies of important attempts to engage public concerns across Europe. (248 pp.)

Ontologies for Developing Things offers a series of analyses of the future-making processes put in motion in contemporary health care systems with the introduction of electronic patient records and other communication technologies. The book shows how such technological development and implementation processes are bound up with multiple other issues: professional, social, economic and political. Through such processes health care ontologies gradually change, often with unanticipated effects. In analyzing these effects, Jensen offers an interpretation of where science and technology studies could be headed - towards performative, non-humanist modes of inquiry. (181 pp.)

Healthcare is technological. Contemporary healthcare is provided through medical devices ranging from the bandage to the bioreactor, from the thermometer to cancer screening tests, from the MRI scanner to the new regenerative medicine. This book opens up the world of medical devices to examine the hidden pathways which shape how technology reaches the bedside. It brings to light a maze of the sciences of safety and efficacy, regulation, surveillance systems, politics, industry strategy, and roles of health professionals and patients. The author introduces new research in five different technologies of varying complexity, risk and usership: artificial hips; blood tests for prostate cancer; infusion pumps; the coagulometer; and tissue engineering. Drawing from the sociology of medicine and from science and technology studies, the book develops new concepts to understand the changing patterns of control and promotion of medical technology, and its meaning in society, to explore new meanings of medicalization and place evidence-based medicine in its policy context. (238 pp.)

The governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since the Second World War, especially with regard to funding structures, the autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. Going beyond previous analyses of these changes in science studies, science policy, and higher education studies, this book presents and applies an approach that provides an integrated assessment of changes in public science systems and their impact on scientific innovation.

Its basic assumptions are (i) that all changes in public science systems (PSS) affect authority relations — the interests and action capabilities of authoritative agencies in science — and (ii) that the authority relations concerning the selection of goals and approaches in research as well as the integration of research results are the channel through which changes in PSS affect the production of scientific knowledge and particularly scientific innovation. This focus on authority relations as the key interface integrating changes in governance and translating them into changes in the production of scientific knowledge is an innovation because the effects of governance at the performance level of the science system have been largely neglected by other approaches.

By demonstrating that changes in authority relations are field-specific and have field-specific effects on knowledge production, and that these field-specific authority relations do indeed affect the conditions for intellectual innovation, the perspective explored in this book challenges science policy studies to ‘bring work back in’ to the study of the organisation and governance of the sciences. (387 pp.)

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication.

In this work, Latour delves into the “belief in naive belief,” the suggestion that fetishes — objects invested with mythical powers — are fabricated and that facts are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work.

Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of “iconoclash,” making comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons. (158 pp.)