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analysis means understanding the coconstruction of classification systems with the means for data collection and validation. |
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To clarify our position here, let us take an analogy. In the early nineteenth century in England there were a huge number of capital crimes, starting from stealing a loaf of bread and going on up. Precisely because the penalties were so draconian, however, few juries would ever impose the maximum sentence; and indeed there was a drastic reduction in the number of executions even as the penal code was progressively strengthened. There are two ways of writing this history: one can either concentrate on the creation of the law; or one can concentrate on the way things worked out in practice. This is very similar to the position taken in Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1993). He argues that we can either look at what scientists say they are doing (working within a purified realm of knowledge) or at what they actually are doing (manufacturing hybrids of nature-culture). We think both are important. We advocate here a pragmatic methodological developmentpay more attention to the classification and standardization work that allows for hybrids to be manufactured and so more deeply explore the terrain of the politics of science in action. |
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The point is that both words and deeds are valid kinds of account. Early sociology of science in the actor-network tradition concentrated on the ways in which it comes to appear that science gives an objective account of natural order: trials of strength, enrolling of allies, cascades of inscriptions, and the operation of immutable mobiles (Latour 1987, 1988). Actor network theory drew attention to the importance of the development of standards (though not to the linked development of classification systems), but did not look at these in detail. Sociologists of science invited us to look at the process of producing something that looked like what the positivists alleged science to be. We got to see the Janus face of science as both constructed and realist. In so doing we followed the actors, often ethnographically. We shared their insights. Allies must be enrolled, translation mechanisms must be set in train so that, in the canonical case, Pasteur's laboratory work can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for French honor after defeat in the battlefield (Latour 1988). |
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By the very nature of the method, However, we also shared the actors' blindness. The actors being followed did not themselves see what was excluded: they constructed a world in which that exclusion could occur. Thus if we just follow the doctors who create the ICD at the WHO in Geneva, we will not see the variety of representation |
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