The social study of science and technology (also called science studies) is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research and theory. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists use a variety of concepts and methods to clarify our understanding of the ways developments in science and technology intersect with social relations. The term technoscience is used to capture the increasing interdependence of science and technology.
Social research contributes to public health efforts in many important ways described elsewhere in this volume. But the social study of science research discussed here is distinctive: It begins from the premise that science is a sociocultural endeavor, and must be analyzed as such. Unlike approaches that simply accept the biomedical account of problems and look solely at the application of medical scientific knowledge, this research examines the ways in which the actual objects, categories, classifications, protocols, and evidentiary claims of science come into being, and are made to matter in the world.
The social study of science research poses the following questions: What is the relation between science and technology, on the one hand, and social relations, cultural values, and regimes of power, on the other? Is technoscience simply an inherently neutral way of accomplishing ends, in accordance with underlying laws of nature? Or is it a socially organized activity through and through, one that produces facts and inventions that carry traces of values and social relations? Do the very processes through which technoscientific innovations emerge reflect and reproduce particular social ends, or sustain certain kinds of social arrangements, and if so, how? Are the meanings and consequences of technoscience in medicine the same everywhere, or for everyone? How, exactly, does work in science and technology alter our worlds?
These types of questions can be applied to the analysis of such issues as pharmaceutical development, distribution and use; disease surveillance and control strategies; vaccine development, promotion, and acceptance; diagnostic technologies and their use in prevention and screening; genetic mapping, testing, and screening; contraceptive and reproductive technologies; the integration of biomedical and other medical traditions; the uses of and global trade in body parts and tissues; the negotiation of international standards of disease classification; and the creation of population-wide databases and information systems. The insights from this work shed light on crosscutting issues of ethics, politics, access, policy formation, and public attitudes as these intersect with technoscientific innovation.
Public policy discussions of innovations in the life sciences and new biotechnologies use an instrumentalist way of speaking of social impact or social consequences. The instrumentalist approach suggests an image of one billiard ball hitting another, an image of the self-contained sphere of science propelling the sphere of the social in a given direction: Cause and effect. The social study of science sets itself apart from this approach by arguing that sociality does not, as this common view suggests, follow after the fact of technoscientific innovation. Instead, social science researchers hold that the production of scientific knowledge itself is a social endeavor.
This position does not assume that scientific objectivity is mere illusion (because it is cultural). Rather, it asks how objectivity is understood and what is involved in achieving it. By looking at what Bruno Latour (1987) has famously called science-in-the-making rather than readymade science, it becomes possible to take into account the interplay of doubts and certainties, and of public controversy and acceptance, which characterize the role of the life sciences in our world. Science studies thus argue that in order to fully understand the implications of the pathways taken in science and technology, it is necessary to develop a more robust picture of how those pathways are built and where they lead. In other words, their investigations of science in society focus on what science ‘does.’
The social study of science can be jarring because it asks us to rethink the conventional ways that we think about facts. It can easily be misunderstood as an attack on science, or even as an attack on reason all together, because it seems to pull the rug out from under claims to objectivity in science. In contrast, researchers in this field argue that to see medical science and technology as inherently cultural requires, first and foremost, that we clear a conceptual space where it is possible to consider what is social in a set of practices that claim to transcend context all together. Thus, rather than accept the truth claims of science and medicine a priori, social researchers are concerned with the relationship between science and society and they inquire into how scientific assumptions are made and are then made persuasive.
This honed, process-oriented focus on the production and use of evidence bears a clear relation to public health’s core concern with improving health at the population level. It sheds new light, for instance, on the complex of factors in a given place and time that make some directions in health related science appear exciting and others uninteresting or infeasible. Given the enduring 10/90 gap (that 10% of research resources go to investigating the health problems afflicting 90% of the world’s population), concerned advocates can benefit from nuanced analyses of how research agendas are built up, backed, pursued, and put to use.
Science studies research is also concerned with examining the dynamics of controversies. For instance, case studies have looked at how the tobacco industry strategically mobilized doubt in the face of evidence of the harmful health effects of smoking (Proctor, 1998); how people living with AIDS in the United States were able to mobilize as an effective patient-advocacy group influencing unfolding scientific research (Epstein, 1996); and how survivors of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster are enabled and constrained in their claims for restitution amidst legal debates over evidence of harm (Fortun, 2001). For many researchers in science studies, the purpose of developing theories about the nature of truth claims is, ultimately, to address pressing questions of social justice and democracy.