David Pontille, Signer ensemble. Contribution et évaluation en sciences, Economica, 2016
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17354
application/pdf
2038-3460
17354
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Barbara Pentimalli
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
David Pontille, Signing Together. Contribution and Evaluation in Sciences, Economica, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2017-07-20
2023-06-22
2017-07-20
2023-08-21
167-171
TS
Barbara Pentimalli
2017/07/20
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17354
167
Università Sapienza di Roma
2038-3460
1
en
171
David Pontille, Signing Together. Contribution and Evaluation in Sciences, Economica, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17354/16203
8
Book Review                                                               167
        Theorizing the Contemporary, in “Cultural Anthropology Online”,
        http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/461-the-politics-of-ontology.
Holbraad, M., Pedersen, M.A. and De Castro, E.V. (2013) The Politics of Ontol-
      ogy: Anthropological Positions Position paper for roundtable discussion,
      paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual
      meeting, Chicago.
Laidlaw, J. and Heywood, P. (2013) One More Turn and You're There, in “An-
       thropology of this century”, 7 (http://aotcpress.com/articles/turn/).
Pedersen, M.A. (2012) Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent Reviews
       of the "Ontological Turn", in “Anthropology of this century”, 5
       (http://aotcpress.com/articles/common_nonsense/).
Scott, M.W. (2013) The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?), in
       “Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute”, 19 (4), pp. 859-872.




                                      ***


    David Pontille
Signer ensemble. Contribution et évaluation en sciences [Signing Togeth-
er. Contribution and Evaluation in Sciences], Paris, Economica, 2016,
pp. 206

Barbara Pentimalli Università Sapienza di Roma

    Since the 1980s we have seen the rise – if not the obsession – of evalu-
ation policies of the academic production through the proliferation of
performance indicators and devices to judge and measure contribution in
sciences (bibliometric indicators, journal classification, and peer review).
The translation of new public management theories into the academic
field with the aim of tracing and measuring the individual contribution
becomes problematic since every scientific activity – as Laboratory Stud-
ies had proved – implies the participation of human teams and the use of
many instruments, artefacts and techniques. So the question is: how to
distinguish the contribution of each one? How to decide who is legiti-
mated to acquire the status of author signing the publication of research
results? How to establish, without any doubt, what a scientific contribu-
tion is? The book Signer Ensemble. Contribution et évaluation en scienc-
es, by David Pontille, analyses scientific contribution by simultaneously
taking into account the issues linked to the knowledge production, the
work organization and the evaluation policies for different historical peri-
168                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

ods and in three research fields: Life sciences, Medicine and Physics of
particles. What makes this book original is that it combines some con-
cepts and approaches coming from Laboratory Studies and Actor-
Network Theory – i.e. the scientific work as a result of alignment of het-
erogeneous elements – with those belonging to the sociology of work.
Pontille asserts that, with the exception of the book Epistemic cultures by
Knorr Cetina (1999), Science and Technologies Studies tended to focus
on the production of scientific authority by neglecting the fine grained
analysis of processes that circumscribe contribution in sciences. There-
fore, Pontille investigates the vocabulary of scientific contributions and
practices of signature by inscribing them into what he calls
“agencements” of scientific work, involving human, economic and tech-
nical resources, and analyses differences in work division, hierarchy of
tasks and technologies of attribution according to specific organizational
forms and epistemic cultures. As the author stressed in a previous publi-
cation – La signature scientifique: une sociologie pragmatique de
l’attribution – researchers’ names in scientific papers have been massively
considered in a quantitative way by transforming signatures into biblio-
metric measurement units instead of documents to be opened. Seeing that
name ordering is characterized by ambiguity (Zuckerman 1968) that re-
searchers try to reduce through specific practices (alphabetic or decreas-
ing order with the relevance of the last position), these names are not neu-
tral recipients for the allocation of credit but allow the evaluation of the
agency supporting scientific statements. Instead of considering research-
ers as the unquestionable origin of scientific production, Pontille grasps
how human actors and instruments that inhabit laboratories are consid-
ered in the evaluation and how technologies of attribution come up by
establishing some shared conventions. Another interesting aspect of the
book is that these conventions are not fixed once and for all, but unsta-
ble: they change and are questioned along historical periods and accord-
ing to specific forms of work organization and knowledge production,
imply controversies among actors of the scientific scene (researchers, sci-
entific journals, editors, professional associations) and represent a tempo-
rary resolution of conflicts for defining what a scientific author and a sci-
entific contribution are. Pontille takes into account the epistemic and or-
ganizational transformations of scientific work by showing how new
forms of knowledge change not only the way to conceive and circum-
scribe the pertinent phenomena to be studied, but also the modes of
work organization and the way to evaluate and identify scientific contri-
bution. Chapter by chapter, the book traces the stabilisation of three re-
gimes of contribution with their own drifts, conflicts and changes: Au-
thorship, Contributorship and Membership. As in the literary world,
where the agency of an author (heir of the romantic figure of genius) is
considered as an instantaneous and creative action instead of a long dis-
tributed activity involving other participants to the production chain (ty-
Book Review                                                             169
pographer, printer, editor), Authorship in science proclaims and recog-
nizes only some genius in spite of a crowd of assistants and technicians,
who remain invisible (Star and Strauss 1999) even they contributed to the
scientific discoveries. The organization of work is based on vertical divi-
sion of specialized tasks and on administrative hierarchy of positions
(professors, researchers, post-doc, PhD students, engineers, technicians).
The owner of a production unit – who synthesizes in his name the com-
bination of epistemic, geographic, social and material elements – acquires
the administrative management and the scientific responsibility. This
conception, coming from the 17th century experimental science (Shapiro
1994), determines also the signature assigning the major part of work to
the responsible of the team (the last name), who cumulates scientific pres-
tige and institutional authority. However, the Authorship becomes pro-
gressively not adapted to the epistemic and organisational changes of
medical research, and an alternative one emerges: the Contributorship,
proposed as a solution to the excessive growth of signatures in scientific
papers. In the 1950s researchers and chief editors argued that the writing
of many impedes the identification of individual contributions. In the
1980s the increase of fraud revealed unacceptable practices in signing pa-
pers presenting false results and the multiplication of honorary signatories
proved the loss of credibility of authorship. Moreover, when research
projects become more multidisciplinary and require the association of
several teams and geographical sites, it becomes more difficult to estab-
lish a hierarchy of contributions or disciplines. In this more horizontal
division of work, the primacy of a only one leader tends to fade away by
undermining the regime of authorship (Wray 2006). The crusade of chief
editors of scientific journals for establishing an alternative option more
adjusted to the new conditions of biomedical research lead to the system-
atic description of the contribution of each signatory to trace the scien-
tific work in a more transparent way. Contributorship no longer recog-
nizes the team as an epistemic, instrumental and geographical unit around
the leader who hold the bigger part of credit and responsibility. The at-
tribution shifts towards the project federating several teams for a period
of time. These new distributed organisational forms give less relevance to
the planning of tasks or to the hierarchy of positions and more im-
portance to the fluidity of activity, the temporary combination of compe-
tencies and the flexibility of operators involved in ephemeral teams. The
third regime of contribution – the Membership – is practiced in the Phys-
ics of particles where a project consists in fabrication, adjustment and
maintenance of a giant instrument (accelerator and detector of particles)
requiring a federation of teams coming from diverse research institutes
over a ten years period. The minuscule, furtive and ephemeral entities
emerging from the collision between particles demand innumerable tests,
regulations and controls to identify their effective presence among the
ground sound. Since the 1990s several laboratories from over the world
170                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

participate in the same project associating a detector to an assembly of
researchers. As the project lies upon a large and durable collaboration
and a decentralized supervision of experiments, the technology of attribu-
tion does not glorify some researchers with exceptional qualities. Actors
contributing to the fabrication, assemblage, regulation and maintenance
of technical infrastructure are all legitimated to sign scientific publica-
tions, without any distinction between technical or intellectual work. The
collective name of the project talks with one voice for multiple research
groups and institutions by privileging the common biography of a massive
instrument and of a large work team.
     The book shows that scientific signatures act differently and gain dif-
ferent value according to their graphical arrangement. In Authorship only
some names acquire relevance while others remain insignificant, the more
the list of names grows the more it is difficult to distinguish the principal
author, each name is in competition with the others and any additional
one undermines the value of others because of the risk of fragmentation.
In Contributorship the names don’t have the same value, the perimeter of
each action is well delineated, the credit is distributed but the responsibil-
ity is individual and the evaluation considers the personal contribution. In
Membership the collective name prevails over the list of signatories, sign-
ing means to be collectively an author (Galison 2003) and the more we
add signatures the more positive it is. Three metaphors for these types of
regimes are as follow: the authorship is like the literary author of an oeu-
vre, the contributorship is like the list of professionals appearing in film
credits and the membership is like a group of people signing a petition.
     Signer Ensemble also suggests an opportunity to reflect within our so-
ciological discipline, also characterised by evaluation policies aiming to
distinguish individual performance within scientific work and by tensions
caused by the consecration of some researchers according to their hierar-
chical positions. Does the signature in sociology tend to favour and award
those who are already well known? Are we faced with a field in which ri-
vals fight each other to obtain scientific prestige by making (in)visible
some of the heterogeneous elements participating to the scientific activity
as, for example, the work of research assistants or the agency of technolo-
gies? Does this obsession with bibliometric indicators and individual
evaluation discourage collaborative work and collective publications?
Does it cause a fragmentation of knowledge in a multitude of brief arti-
cles on very well-known scientific journals to the detriment of a richer
theoretical reflection?


References
Galison, P. (2003) The Collective Author, in M. Biagioli and P. Galison (eds.),
       Scientific Authorship. Credit and Intellectual Property in Science, New
       York, Routledge, pp. 325-355.
Book Review                                                                  171
Knorr Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge,
       Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1989) La science en action, Paris, La Découverte.
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
       Facts, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Pontille, D. (2004) La Signature scientifique: une sociologie pragmatique de
        l’attribution, Paris, CNRS Éditions.
Shapiro, S. (1994) A Social History of the Truth: Civility and Science in Seven-
       teenth-Century England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Star, S.L. and Strauss, A. (1999) Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology
        of Visible and Invisible Work, in “Computer Supported Cooperation
        Work”, 8 (1-2), pp. 9-30.
Wray, B.K. (2006) Scientific Authorship in the Age of Collaborative Research, in
       “Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A”, 37 (3), pp. 505-
       514.
Zuckerman, H.A. (1968) Patterns of Name Ordering among Authors of Scientific
      Papers: A Study of Social Symbolism and Its Ambiguity, in “American
      Journal of Sociology”, 74 (3), pp. 276-291.



                                        ***


   Simone Tosoni with Trevor Pinch
Entanglements: Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound, Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press, 2017, pp. 200

Mariacristina Sciannamblo Madeira Interactive Technologies Insti-
tute

    Science and Technology Studies (STS) are a compelling and hetero-
geneous interdisciplinary body of knowledge that has come a long way
and continues to attract new generations of researchers. Despite in some
geographical areas, such as Southern Europe, they are still relatively new,
the maturity acquired after decades of intellectual debate and research
efforts in the field are spurring moments of reflection and reflexivity
among STS leading scholars, who do not dodge providing their own sto-
ries and viewpoints on the development of the field through conversa-
tions and interviews. In reading them, we come to know that, for exam-
ple, Donna Haraway started reading St. Thomas when she was about
twelve years old because of the advice of a Jesuite priest (Lykke et al.
