10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17026
This paper discusses Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Norway by using interdisciplinarity as an accounting device. I present several ideas about interdisciplinarity in relation to STS, but Sheila Jasanoff’s proposal of a disciplined STS seems to fit best with the Norwegian scene.
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Knut H. Sørensen
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Norway
Disciplined Interdisciplinarity? A Brief Account of STS in Norway
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2012-06-16
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2012-06-16
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Knut H. Sørensen
2012/06/16
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17026
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Norwegian University of Science and Technology
2038-3460
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Norway
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Disciplined Interdisciplinarity? A Brief Account of STS in Norway
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17026/15910
3
                                                                        Cartography
Disciplined Interdisciplinarity?
A Brief Account of STS in Norway1


Knut H. Sørensen



      Abstract This paper discusses Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Norway
      by using interdisciplinarity as an accounting device. I present several ideas about
      interdisciplinarity in relation to STS, but Sheila Jasanoff’s proposal of a disciplined
      STS seems to fit best with the Norwegian scene.

      Keywords Science and Technology Studies; Interdisciplinarity; Institutionalisation;
      Norway.




Introduction: how to account for STS?
   In the mid-1990s, I was involved in an effort to map technology studies in a
number of European countries (Cronberg and Sørensen 1995; Sørensen 1997).
An underlying idea of this effort was to analyse the emergence of social study of
technology as a scholarly field. While we could observe a common set of con-
cerns, above related to innovation policy, the institutional matrix of intellectual
development varied considerably.
   The underlying expectation was convergence; that we would find national dif-
ferences in the shaping of technology studies but that these differences would
diminish as technology studies was consolidated internationally. We observed a
shared international body of scholarly knowledge, but this appeared to be inter-
preted and used in different fashions. Thus, apparently, there was an interesting
relationship between international and national intellectual developments that
could not be understood in simple terms like ‘reception’ or ‘national styles’. With
respect to Norway, I argued (Sørensen 1995) that technology studies had been
shaped above all through an interaction between an economic history of technol-


1
  The paper has benefitted from valuable comments from Helen Jøsok Gansmo, Vivian Anette
Lagesen, Nora Levold, Marianne Ryghaug and the editors of Tecnoscienza. The remaining
faults are my responsibility.



TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Volume 3(1) pp. 49-61- ISSN 2038-3460
http://www.tecnoscienza.net                       © 2012 TECNOSCIENZA
50 SØRENSEN



   ogy and industrial technology, but with a clear imprint of the international devel-
   opment of technology studies as a field of research.
       Now, more than 15 years later, I have been asked to provide a kind of cartog-
   raphy of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Norway. Would the previous
   report provide an interesting point of departure for an update? I think no, for
   two reasons. First, STS in Norway has become more established while catering a
   broader set of intellectual concerns. This makes it more difficult to account for
   the Norwegian STS scene. Second, the convergence model that we conversed
   with in the earlier work, appear less satisfactory as a tool to make sense of the
   present situation. Rather, reflecting on how to make sense of Norwegian STS, it
   struck me to use the concept of interdisciplinarity as an accounting device. On
   the one hand, STS in Norway – like in many other countries – cultivates interdis-
   ciplinarity by using the concept as a distinguishing quality. This represents a di-
   versifying force. On the other hand, efforts particularly with respect to education
   pursue a path of disciplinarity, a unifying feature. Is this a paradox? May we use
   the situation of STS in Norway to illuminate what the doing of interdisciplinarity
   could mean?
       A potentially important feature is that scholarly fields like STS tend to have a
   local as well as an international flavour, which may influence the practices of in-
   terdisciplinarity. Scholars address concerns that may meet with local as well as
   international interest and grapple with the issues using local as well as interna-
   tional interpretative resources of disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary charac-
   ter. Arguably, addressing an international audience focused on STS could be
   seen to be a force of disciplinary convergence, while addressing national commu-
   nities that have thematic rather than disciplinary interests could be presumed to
   produce an interdisciplinary and thus more disjointed orientation. However, the
   effort of Martin et al. (2012) to provide an overview of the knowledge base of
   STS in general should serve as a warning that this may be more complex. They
   claim that internationally, STS is fragmented, even if there is some agreement
   about the scholarly contributions that constitute the core of the field. The frag-
   mentation is in the paper partly attributed to weak institutionalisation but also to
   an observation that STS – compared to adjunct fields like innovation studies and
   entrepreneurial studies – has a more ‘egalitarian’ flavour, which makes consensus
   building more challenging.
       To pursue these issues, the next section presents some main institutional fea-
   tures of STS in Norway as a point of departure for discussing to what extent and
   through which means institutionalisation has happened. As we shall see, discipli-
   nary forces are at work, raising questions about why the label of interdisciplinari-
   ty still is used, eventually what it means to use this label. In response to such
   questions, I turn to a more general discussion about interdisciplinarity and STS,
   before getting back to the Norwegian case with a focus on some features of the
   publication output of Norwegian STS scholars. How is the relationship between
   national concerns and internationally oriented contributions? What may we learn
   about scholarly dynamics of a self-proclaimed interdisciplinary field like STS?
                                                           TECNOSCIENZA – 3 (1)       51



1. STS coming of age in Norway: notes on interdisciplinary build-
ing of institutions

    In 2009, the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions con-
firmed the establishment of an academic council for Science and Technology
Studies. This could be seen as a formal acknowledgement of STS as a scholarly
field in Norway. The academic council consists of representatives of three institu-
tions: Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of
Bergen (SVT), Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Os-
lo (TIK), and Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian
University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (KULT). These three institu-
tions are the core STS communities in the Norwegian university context; howev-
er, as we shall see, STS also has other important outlets.
    The history of the three institutions indicate different pathways in the making
of STS in Norway, where the establishment of teaching programmes have played
an interesting role as a force of convergence. SVT in Bergen was formed in 1987,
initially to undertake teaching of theory of science at University of Bergen. The
profile of the centre has been dominated by philosophy, but increasingly, the re-
search has been directed at ELSA (Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) topics.
With respect to SVT, it is mainly the engagement in these kinds of inquiries that
during the last decade or so have given the centre a distinct STS profile.
    TIK was started in 1999 when the previous Centre for Technology and Hu-
man Values (TMV) was merged with an innovation studies group. TMV, which
comprised the initial STS effort at the University of Oslo, was formed in 1988.
This was a result of an initiative from the Norwegian Academy of Science and
Letters to initiate research to critically investigate the interaction of modern
technology and social values. Such mandate is recognisable as a starting point of
many STS programs also in other countries, where a main focus has been to ex-
plore in a critical fashion the role of modern science and technology in society,
including ethical engagement with the teaching of engineers. TMV became at the
outset a stronghold of history of technology in Norway, drawing in particular on
economic history approaches. However, other humanist disciplines and social
sciences became increasingly important during the 1990s, broadening and solidi-
fying the STS profile of TMV. Leading STS scholars like Donna Haraway and
Sharon Traweek visited TMV, and later John Law was appointed adjunct profes-
sor. This process of developing an STS community has continued through the
new centre, TIK, which was organised with two sections: STS and innovation
studies.
    KULT was established in 1999, as a merger between Centre for Women’s
Studies and Centre for Technology and Society (CTS). CTS was formed by the
university in 1988 and became the main STS institution in Trondheim. This hap-
pen partly as a response to a series of initiatives from STS scholars to get an STS
centre established, but also as a reaction to the TMV initiative in Oslo. Like
TMV, CTS was to engage in research and teaching in the field of science, tech-
52 SØRENSEN



   nology and society, with particular emphasis on the interaction between social
   change and technological development, history of technology and studies of
   technological R&D and innovation. During its first decade, CTS mainly com-
   bined historical and sociological approaches to STS but also information science
   and philosophy of technology. Later, people with other disciplinary training like
   anthropology, psychology and political science were recruited.
       Thus, all the three core STS university institutions were founded in the late
   1980s. While SVT in Bergen was formed with a specific purpose of teaching the-
   ory of science, in particular to PhD students, TIK (TMV) in Oslo and KULT
   (CTS) were initiated as a response to a concern about the social implications of –
   in particular – modern technology. In the same period, research programmes
   were launched to fund research related to innovation, social effects of new tech-
   nologies and social features of technology, in particular information technology.
   These programmes were intended to cater for a broader set of approaches than
   STS, but they offered important opportunities for the centres to fund research, in
   particular PhDs. A growing concern for social and ethical issues in the engineer-
   ing communities also paved the way for STS in Norway. For example, CTS was
   called upon to teach environmental ethics to engineering students. However, un-
   like many other countries, the Norwegian STS centres were not populated by es-
   tablished scientists and engineers, who wanted to critically engage with the ef-
   fects of science and technology.
       In terms of the disciplinary background of the people involved, STS in Nor-
   way was formed with an interdisciplinary point of departure. With the exception
   of SVT, which mainly was a philosophy of science centre, the community grew
   through a disciplinary matrix where history and sociology of technology were
   particularly forceful. In addition, interaction with engineering sciences and archi-
   tecture was important. To what extent was this caused by interdisciplinary ambi-
   tions? How should we characterise the interdisciplinary practices of STS in Nor-
   way? To deal with such questions, we need to clarify the concept of interdiscipli-
   narity as well as how it has been applied to STS more broadly.


   2. Interdisciplinarity and STS: an interacting field?
      Arguably, STS is a self-proclaimed interdisciplinary area. The Introduction to
   the most recent handbook of science and technology studies states bluntly that:
   “STS has become an interdisciplinary field that is creating an integrative under-
   standing of the origins, dynamics and consequences of science and technology
   (…). Through three decades of interdisciplinary interaction and integration,
   shifting intellectual continents and cataclysmic conceptual shocks, perseverance
   and imagination, STS has become institutionalized and intellectually influential,
   and STS scholars have become engaged in various arenas of activism and policy”
   (Hackett et al. 2008, 1). When we look beyond the self-gratulatory rhetoric, it is
   interesting to note how the concept of interdisciplinarity is left unaccounted for.
   The Handbook editors do not seem to feel that they have to explain what inter-
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 3 (1)        53



disciplinarity means or why this label applies to STS. Apparently, STS is interdis-
ciplinary because it cannot be disciplinary.
    Scholarship on interdisciplinarity distinguishes between a multitude of differ-
ent practices (e.g., Klein 2010). However, Peter Weingart (2010) claims that new
interdisciplinary fields are formed either as new specialised fields of inquiry or as
fields promoted by funding agencies. The latter are “combinations of disciplines
or sub-disciplines that are joined in research centers, journals, and funding pro-
grams but that remain intellectually independent and continue to develop indi-
vidually (…). Thus, disciplines and their derivatives, specialities, and research
fields, remain the principal organizational unit for the production and diffusion
of knowledge” (Weingart 2010, 13). Weingart’s argument applies to interdisci-
plinarity in general. Is STS a specialised field or a funding agency construction?
    Sheila Jasanoff (2010) addresses the issue of STS and interdisciplinarity in a
different way. To begin with, she notes that in 2001, STS was included as an ‘in-
tersecting field’ in the International encyclopedia of social and behavioral sciences.
Jasanoff claims that this was the first time that “STS was named as a card-
carrying field in a comprehensive roster of the social and behavioral sciences” (p.
191). The label ‘intersecting field’ is an interesting one, because it was intended
to emphasise that STS operated in the intersection of social and behavioural sci-
ences on the one hand, and natural and engineering sciences on the other. Ac-
cordingly, STS was located in a comprehensive disciplinary matrix, indicating
that the field would be engaged in a wide variety of interdisciplinary situations.
    Jasanoff interprets this to mean that STS is interdisciplinary in a very particu-
lar way. STS has not, she claims, come into being: “principally through exchang-
es among scholars already belonging to one or another established disciplinary
community and trained in its forms of reasoning and research practices” (p. 192).
Thus, in her understanding, the interdisciplinarity of STS is not primarily about
crossing and bridging borders, which are Julie Thompson Klein’s (1996) fa-
voured metaphors for interdisciplinary practices. Rather, Jasanoff sees STS as “an
independent disciplinary formation situated among other disciplines”. For her,
STS is “an attempt to chart unknown territories among islands of disciplined
thought in the high seas of the unknown” (p. 192-93).
    There are good arguments to support the idea that the topic of STS, to study
the practices of science and technology as well as their effects, largely has been
ignored by other disciplines. Still, as Jasanoff notes, when STS claims special sta-
tus as the field that analyses science and technology, this is not universally ac-
cepted. Other disciplines and specialities maintain that they also study aspects of
the topic, and such scholars even participate in STS meetings and publish in STS
journals. Moreover, also within STS, there is considerable reluctance to claim
special status and to engage in the building of institutions necessary to support
the claim. Thus, Jasanoff observes ironically that “Many therefore prefer … to
retain STS as a loosely constructed society to which anyone with a passing inter-
est can gain easy entry. This broad-church approach satisfies liberal academics’
often deep-seated desire for intellectual democracy, but it also gets in the way of
54 SØRENSEN



   critical stock-taking, meaningful theorizing, and methodological innovation – in
   short, of disciplining” (p. 204).
       In this manner, Jasanoff suggests an ambiguous image of STS, as a potential
   discipline but where many practitioners are reluctant to realise the potential.
   What are the consequences of this situation? I shall address the issues by return-
   ing to the case of Norway, but let me first briefly suggest a few more concerns
   that may be relevant to the exploration of interdisciplinarity in STS. In a recent
   paper, Bruno Latour (2010) complains humorously that his books are difficult to
   find because they are spread over a number of labels – law, engineering, travel
   (!), and spirituality. This is a nice example that STS may have a problem with re-
   spect to audiences. On the one hand, STS is too small a field to merit its own la-
   bel, for example in bookstores. On the other hand, STS research is read by many
   different disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) audiences. Put in another way, STS
   scholars face an interesting but challenging situation when communicating their
   findings since STS potentially has a heterogeneous audience of outsiders, in addi-
   tion to the insiders of the field. In addition, it is unclear how to differentiate be-
   tween outsiders and insiders in STS.
       On several occasions, I have argued the need to distinguish between interdis-
   ciplinarity understood as, on the one hand, an encyclopaedically oriented indi-
   vidually based undertaking, and on the other as a team effort of managing dis-
   tributed but potentially additive knowledges (see, e.g., Sørensen 2010). Latour
   could, with some reservations, be seen as an instance of the first idea, which
   seems to resonate fairly well with standard STS practices. Obviously, there are
   limitations to omniscient knowledge practices. Harry Collins and Robert Evans
   (2002) usefully suggest the concept of interactional expertise to catch important
   features of this situation. They define interactional expertise as having sufficient
   competence to interact interestingly with participants from other specialities and
   carry out a sociological analysis of their practices (p. 254). They contrast this to
   contributory expertise, which means that one has to be an insider to the particu-
   lar field of inquiry. To have contributory expertise in more than one field is very
   demanding. However, to acquire interactional expertise is more doable even if
   that also requires substantial effort.
       To sum up, we face at least four ways of understanding STS as an interdisci-
   plinary effort. First, following Klein (1996), we may see STS as meeting-place of
   scholars from a diversity of disciplines and specialities, engaged in border-
   crossing and bridge-building to explore science and technology. Second, Jasanoff
   (2010) proposes to see STS as a discipline that explores what is in-between (in-
   ter) other disciplines and specialities. Third, drawing on Collins and Evans
   (2002), we may consider STS a scholarly community whose interdisciplinarity re-
   lies on interactional expertise as the main tool of making sense of and translating
   between other disciplines of science and technology. Fourth and final, drawing
   on Weingart (2010), we could ask if the self-claimed interdisciplinarity of STS is
   just a cloak under which a diversity of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary interest
   are developed and pursued. How does STS in Norway compare to these four
   perceptions?
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 3 (1)         55




3. Towards a room of its own
    During the 1980s, several initiatives were taken to develop STS scholarship in
Norway, which eventually lead to the establishment of the STS centres in Oslo
and Trondheim (Sørensen 1995). A common feature of these efforts was a fairly
inclusive strategy with respect to scholarly involvement. For example, the initia-
tives to develop history of technology comprised not only historians, but engi-
neers, economists, sociologists, ethnologists, and political scientists (Thomassen
1997). Thus, TMV (TIK) as well as CTS (KULT) were established from tradi-
tions where interdisciplinarity was a common feature. This also included impacts
from the scholarly practices of fields like work life studies and gender studies.
However, interdisciplinarity did not happen without controversy. Particularly in
the case of history of technology, engineers and historians held different views
about how to proceed (Thomassen 1997). In the end, the historians came to
dominate this sub-set of STS inquiry but not completely. In STS more broadly, a
fairly inclusive approach dominated. Interdisciplinary participation was a given
feature in the establishment of Norwegian STS, at least if we understand inter-
disciplinarity as scholarly interaction of people with diverse disciplinary training.
What were the consequences of this interdisciplinary recruitment to STS? To
what extent do we observe interdisciplinarity in the resulting knowledge practic-
es?
    To begin with, if we look at the publication output of the people involved in
the establishment of STS in Norway, we find that most of them published as in-
dividual authors or together with people of similar disciplinary orientation. His-
torians wrote with historians, sociologists with sociologists, with only a few ex-
ceptions. Still, the rather cynical proposal of Weingart (2010) that interdiscipli-
narity mainly is a way of funding the pursuit of disciplinary concerns does not
quite match the Norwegian STS situation. Actually, the emerging scholarly prac-
tices fitted fairly well with Klein (1996) emphasis on boundary crossing and
bridge building because there has been (and still are) considerable cross-
disciplinary traffic in theory and methods.
    A simple indicator of this traffic is the disciplinary diversity in the lists of ref-
erence of Norwegian STS scholars. However, strictly speaking, this is just evi-
dence of cross-disciplinary reading not of interdisciplinary scholarship. The latter
issue is more complex. Actually, I will claim that when one reads the scholarly
publications of STS people in Norway, it is usually possible to identify discipli-
nary imprints that suggest that there are anthropological, historical, philosophical
and sociological (or social science) versions of STS writing. However, there is still
an STS flavour that distinguishes this writing from that of mainstream scholars
from the disciplines. Typically, publications of the Norwegian STS community
would not be recognised as mainstream contribution of a traditional discipline,
even if they may be acknowledged as contributions to historical, sociological, an-
thropological, philosophical, etc. inquiry.
56 SØRENSEN



      Another interesting and related feature is the development of care in the
   scholarly conduct with respect to disciplinary boundaries within the STS com-
   munity. I know this particularly well from my own institution, CTS (KULT),
   where this practice emerged from conflicts regarding use of theory, methodology
   and style of writing. In particular, we had to learn that historically and social sci-
   ence oriented STS scholars often pursued similar agendas in different ways. This
   produced a kind of competence that Michelle Lamont (2009) calls cognitive con-
   textualisation, namely the skill of relating to pieces of scholarship on their own
   scholarly premises. Cognitive contextualisation is important in interdisciplinary
   communities to avoid unproductive disciplinary conflicts in scholarly exchanges.
   Usually, papers authored by historians would be discussed with that feature of
   origin in mind, similarly with anthropologists and sociologists, so that the papers
   receive comments acknowledging different approaches and styles of writing. This
   does not mean that features originating with disciplines outside STS should not
   be discussed, but such debates seem best to be conducted while acknowledging
   the disciplinary border crossing involved.
      The ability of Norwegian STS scholars to do cognitive contextualisation was
   also related to the development of interactional expertise regarding the neigh-
   bouring disciplines. A social science oriented STS person would normally not be
   seen as a contributor to, e.g., history of technology or history of science, and vice
   versa. However, there would be recognition of what was involved in historical
   and social science oriented STS scholarship that allowed fruitful interaction.
      What about Jasanoff’s view of STS as a discipline? Actually, STS in Norway
   has – at least institutionally – pursued a disciplinary path, in particular with re-
   spect to teaching. The previously mentioned recognition of the Norwegian Asso-
   ciation of Higher Education Institutions through the establishment of an aca-
   demic council for Science and Technology Studies is evidence that this pursuit
   has met with some success. All three university centres have established STS
   teaching programmes. SVT in Bergen has a PhD programme. TIK in Oslo has
   two master programmes and a PhD programme in STS and Innovation studies.
   KULT in Trondheim has a master programme, a PhD programme and a one year
   undergraduate programme in STS. These programmes have mostly been started
   during the last decade. Annually, 25-35 MAs and 5-10 PhDs graduate. However,
   there is no Norwegian STS society and no STS journal. In terms of teaching,
   Norwegian STS is beginning to look like a discipline, but what about research?
   So far, I have painted an ambiguous picture. Is Norwegian STS research in the
   final instance a pursuit of concerns related to traditional disciplines? If not, what
   kind of interdisciplinarity may we observe?


   4. A broad church?
       Some STS scholars in Norway publish in disciplinary journals of history, polit-
   ical science, sociology, etc. However, this pattern of publication is fairly marginal.
   The majority of STS publications are found in other outlets. Actually, when we
                                                            TECNOSCIENZA – 3 (1)        57



look at the journals where Norwegian STS scholars publish, the most striking fea-
ture is diversity. We do of course find papers in STS journals like Social Studies
of Science and Science, Technology & Human Values, but not very many. Ra-
ther, the publications of Norwegian STS scholars are found in quite specialised,
interdisciplinary and thematically oriented journal and over a wide spectrum of
topics.
    Thus, the typical Norwegian STS paper is addressing concerns in other inter-
disciplinary areas. We find contributions to fields like gender studies, energy
studies, building studies, environmental studies, climate science, policy studies,
media studies, information and communication technology studies, disability
studies, ethics, social studies of genetics, etc. This suggests that Norwegian STS
publications are border crossing, but not so much with respect to traditional dis-
ciplines as to other interdisciplinary fields that are defined mainly through topical
interest. What kind of interdisciplinarity is this?
    The way Norwegian STS publications from the last decade are spread thinly
over a fairly large number of interdisciplinary, topical journals – about 100 dif-
ferent ones – suggests two features of Norwegian STS scholarship. First, that it is
mainly applied and problem-oriented. Second, that it is not so much STS as be-
longing to other interdisciplinary fields. Nevertheless, these two assumptions are
misleading. While the dichotomy of basic versus applied research never was an
STS favourite, we should note that many of the publications pursue theoretical
agendas. Moreover, these theoretical agendas tend to be either distinctly STS-ish
(to the extent we may use that label) or involving the use of STS reasoning when
addressing concerns of other interdisciplinary areas. The typical paper would
contain at least some reference to core STS literature, like actor-network theory
or co-production theory.
    Let me give a few examples. Kristin Asdal has in several publications ad-
dressed the making of environmental policy in Norway by combining a historical
approach with the use of actor-network theory. This has resulted in an interesting
development of the Foucauldian concept of political technologies (see, e.g., As-
dal 2008, 2011). Thomas Berker (2005) uses actor-network theory to address the
issue of energy efficiency in buildings. More particularly, he draws on some re-
cent developments of ANT – political ecology (Latour 2004) and object lessons
(Law and Singleton 2005) – that Berker argues to be more useful as tools to ac-
count for the fluidity of energy efficiency in buildings without referring to es-
sences and dualisms. Ingunn Moser has made use of ANT to develop new per-
spectives on disability. She has been concerned with the way disability is enacted
in everyday life, raising typical STS concerns about ordering and differentiation
(Moser 2005, 2006).
    In this manner, Norwegian STS scholarship provides evidence of a disciplined
interdisciplinarity not only with regard to teaching programmes but also with re-
spect to publications. This runs counter to the claim of Martin et al. (2012) that
STS research is fragmented. The spread of publications over a large number of
journals mostly outside the (small) STS core should rather be interpreted as evi-
dence of interactional expertise (Collins and Evans 2002) and that Norwegian
58 SØRENSEN



   STS really performs as an ‘interacting field’. Instead of seeing STS as fragmented,
   there are good reasons to claim that STS is rhizome-like in the sense that the field
   is spreading through interaction with, but also in-between, a large number of dis-
   ciplinary and interdisciplinary fields.
       We find two more indications of the latter point in Norwegian STS research.
   First, the STS centres have proven surprisingly successful in attracting funding
   from a wide range of research programmes. The dominant source has been Re-
   search Council of Norway, where we find STS scholars obtaining funding from
   programmes addressing environmental concerns, sustainable energy, information
   and communication technologies, culture, new materials, and climate change is-
   sues – to mention some of them. This success is not just evidence of the potential
   of STS to be a relevant mode of inquiry into a fairly large number of scientific –
   including engineering – fields. It also supports the claim of STS scholars that they
   have developed interactional expertise with respect to many fields.
       The rhizome-like quality of STS is also evident from the fact that STS is
   drawn upon by scholars outside of the core STS centres. There are STS scholars
   located in other institutions like departments of sociology, anthropology and so-
   cial science. The contract research institute Nordic Institute for Studies in Inno-
   vation, Research and Education (NIFU) employs a number of STS scholars who
   for a long time has contributed to and participated in the international STS
   community. Still, we find references to core STS literature in a much wider
   community of Norwegian social scientists and humanists. There has also been a
   marked increase of participation in international STS meetings by scholars out-
   side of the core STS centres.
       Does this mean that Norwegian STS will develop through a broad church ap-
   proach, like Jasanoff (2010) describes? This claim is difficult to assess, above all
   because of the lack of a reasonably well-defined Norwegian STS arena, like con-
   ferences, journals or an association. As I have argued earlier, what is visible is a
   process of institutionalisation focused on the development of education pro-
   grammes, related to the three core STS centres. This gives the impression of
   Norwegian STS as discipline-like. If there is a broad church tendency, this is ra-
   ther enacted on the international arena through the participation in the meetings
   of Society for Social Studies of Science and European Association for the Study
   of Science and Technology of people from a diverse group of disciplines and
   specialities.
       In fact, the lack of a reasonably well-defined Norwegian STS arena may be
   explained by the fairly strong international orientation of STS scholars in Nor-
   way. Much of the publication efforts are addressing an international rather than a
   national audience. Also, in terms of research collaborations, Norwegian STS
   scholars tend to work more often with STS scholars from other countries than
   Norway. In this sense, we could say that Norwegian STS is an open scholarly
   community. Not by being broad church and fragmented, but by being more con-
   cerned with interacting with STS scholars abroad than with constructing a tight
   Norwegian STS community.
                                                            TECNOSCIENZA – 3 (1)        59




Conclusion: a disciplined interdiscipline

    In the final instance, I think it is fair to describe Norwegian STS as having a
distinct interdisciplinary orientation. However, as we have seen, the implications
of such a claim are not obvious. In this paper, I have discussed what this way of
characterising Norwegian STS might mean and some consequences of the im-
plied mode of operation. Previously, I identified several possible features of in-
terdisciplinarity in relation to STS: disciplinary efforts in disguise (Weingart
2010), border crossing and bridge building (Klein 1996), interactional expertise
(Collins and Evans 2002), a disciplined effort to research unexplored (or under-
explored) concerns in-between other disciplines (Jasanoff 2010), and fragmenta-
tion (Martin et al. 2012). None of these characteristics fits exclusively. Weingart’s
characterisation does not coincide very well with my observations of Norwegian
STS, and at least some of the noted features, contradict the claim of Martin et al.
about fragmentation. However, the three other suggestions make sense. STS in
Norway is engaged in border crossing and bridge building, it is continuously de-
veloping interactional expertise, and it shows distinct disciplinary features, in
particular with regard to education programmes at the three main universities in
Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim.
    I believe the engagement in developing STS education programmes is a driver
with respect to institutionalisation and the disciplining of the Norwegian STS
community. This is because the making of such programmes raise concerns about
what are core competences of STS, and these concerns – discussed in relation to
developments of STS internationally – implies some level of standardisation. This
does not mean the education programmes are very similar, but there are im-
portant overlaps in terms of curricular content.
    I have also argued that the publication efforts of Norwegian STS scholars
have a definite STS core, even if most of the publications are published in inter-
disciplinary, topic oriented, non-STS journals. Thus, it is above all Jasanoff’s
proposal of a disciplined STS that seems to provide the most interesting way of
characterising the Norwegian scene. Also, her way of outlining the interdiscipli-
nary features of STS as above all related to exploring concerns inter other disci-
plines make good sense in the analysis of Norwegian STS. This means that the
development of interactional expertise is a central feature of the research activi-
ties.
    STS definitely has rhizome-like qualities as evidenced by the spread of STS in-
to many areas of topical inquiry as well as the increasing use of references to STS
literature outside the STS community. I believe these are strengths rather than
weaknesses. The important distinction that Jasanoff makes between a broad
church and a more disciplined approach to doing STS, appears in the Norwegian
context to have an ironic twist: the broad church approach is enacted on the in-
ternational scene, while within Norway, a disciplined approach dominates.
    Maybe this is a convenient situation for STS, at least seen from the perspective
of a small country like Norway. In the national context, the concerns of teaching
60 SØRENSEN



   STS points towards discipline and standards. On the international scene, a broad
   church approach creates a productive melting pot. This suggests that the charac-
   terisation of Norwegian STS as a disciplined interdisciplinarity is a fairly stable
   description, while the rhizome-like qualities of STS research will contribute to a
   growing topical scope of scholarship.



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    Knut H. Sørensen Norwegian University of Science and Technology
    Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture
    7491, Trondheim, Norway
    Email: knut.sorensen@ntnu.no
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