10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16990
This lecture intends to be a journey through ongoing conversations that over time gave a situated meaning to the black box of STS. It tells the story (or rather stories) of how these perspectives have influenced the study targets of various groups of researchers, mainly sociologists and students of organization, technology and science. Using a narrative technique, it places the reference texts of the authors who have helped to build the STS perspective centre stage. The lecture focuses on traditions, authors and intellectual and research trajectories, and then concentrates on the ways in which we are preparing to pass the baton to a younger generation of academics, both in Italy and elsewhere. It also highlights how this new generation is acquiring relevance in the ongoing debate surrounding the social sciences. The texts examined represent the dense texture of the diverse STS perspectives.
application/pdf
2038-3460
16990
1
en
Silvia Gherardi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
situated knowledge
A Text of Texts…almost a Texture
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
2
Lectures
2011-06-27
2023-05-22
2011-06-27
2023-07-03
7-20
TS
Silvia Gherardi
2011/06/27
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16990
7
University of Trento
2038-3460
1
situated knowledge
en
20
A Text of Texts…almost a Texture
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/16990/15891
2
                                                                            Lecture
A Text of Texts…almost a Texture


Silvia Gherardi



      Abstract: This lecture intends to be a journey through ongoing conversations
      that over time gave a situated meaning to the black box of STS. It tells the story
      (or rather stories) of how these perspectives have influenced the study targets of
      various groups of researchers, mainly sociologists and students of organization,
      technology and science. Using a narrative technique, it places the reference texts
      of the authors who have helped to build the STS perspective centre stage. The
      lecture focuses on traditions, authors and intellectual and research trajectories,
      and then concentrates on the ways in which we are preparing to pass the baton to
      a younger generation of academics, both in Italy and elsewhere. It also highlights
      how this new generation is acquiring relevance in the ongoing debate surrounding
      the social sciences. The texts examined represent the dense texture of the diverse
      STS perspectives.

      Keywords: narration; text; texture; technology; situated knowledge.




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Volume 2(1) pp. 7-20 - ISSN 2038-3460
http://www.tecnoscienza.net                       © 2011 TECNOSCIENZA
8   GHERARDI



       The invitation to speak at the first Italian EASST conference is a great honour
    and gave me the opportunity to rethink and to reflect on the way STS studies were
    welcomed to Trento and what this meant to the group of people (mainly labour
    and organization sociologists and scholars of technology and industrial relations)
    who began working here at the beginning of the ’80s. Many of them are still here
    and are ready to pass the baton to the next generation of scholars, those who re-
    cently set up STS Italia.
       I wish to tell a local story, a personal and collective narrative from the margins,
    in order to contextualise this conference within an intellectual tradition and a dis-
    ciplinary field. My story is intended to be a journey through ongoing conversations
    that over time gave a situated meaning to the black box of STS. I chose some texts,
    images and metaphors to be the spokespersons of flesh and blood authors, many of
    whom are here in the audience and hopefully can join in my narrative. Every re-
    spectable story starts with ‘once upon a time’ and once upon a time…there were
    tools!
       In fact, in the first issue of Technology and Culture (the review of the Society for
    the History of Technology), in 1959, we find an article by Peter Drucker, a well-
    known author in organization studies, another interdisciplinary field. May we say
    that tools and technology have long represented a common trait linking the future
    STS and Organization Studies?
       Let’s read the first lines of ‘Work and Tools’:
        Man [!], alone of all animals, is capable of purposeful, non-organic evolution; he makes
    tools. This observation by Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory
    of evolution, may seem obvious if not trite. But it is a profound insight. [...]. One such im-
    plication is that from a biologist's (or a historian's) point of view, the technologist's identi-
    fication of tool with material artefact is quite arbitrary. Language too is a tool, and so are all
    abstract concepts. This does not mean that the technologist's definition should be discard-
    ed. All human disciplines rest after all on similarly arbitrary distinctions. But it does mean
    that technologists ought to be conscious of the artificiality of their definition and careful
    lest it become a barrier rather than a help to knowledge and understanding. This is particu-
    larly relevant for the history of technology, I believe. According to the technologist's defini-
    tion of "tool", the abacus and the geometer's compass are normally considered technology,
    but the multiplication table or a table of logarithms are not. Yet this arbitrary division
    makes all but impossible the understanding of so important a subject as the development of
    the technology of mathematics. Similarly the technologist's elimination of the fine arts from
    his field of vision blinds the historian of technology to an understanding of the relationship
    between scientific knowledge and technology. For scientific thought and knowledge were
    married to the fine arts, at least in the West, long before they even got on speaking terms
    with the mechanical crafts: in the mathematical number theories of the designers of the
    Gothic cathedral,' in the geometric optics of Renaissance painting, or in the acoustics of
    the great Baroque organs. And Lynn T. White, Jr. has shown in several recent articles that
    to understand the history and development of the mechanical devices of the Middle Ages
    we must understand something so non-mechanical and non-material as the new concept of
    the dignity and sanctity of labour which St. Benedict first introduced.
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       9



    We may note several things: first that gender studies, cyberfeminism and ‘polit-
ical correctness’ is yet to come (but later has proved very influential in STS); the
idea of semiotic-material artefacts was already there; so was the awareness of the
power of categories and categorization; the link between scientific knowledge and
aesthetics had already been problematized (but later was almost forgotten); finally,
the symbolism of work was taken into consideration.
    We were in 1959 and at that time I was at primary school and was not reading
Technology and Culture. Today, by the way, I am surprised by this text and I like
to see it as a precursor of STS vocabulary.
    20 years later, a new actor – the computer – enters the scene and with it compu-
ting, the cultures of computing and so on, but… what is a computer?
Sherry Turkle, in “Computer as Rorschach”, Society 17 (1979: 15-24) gave an an-
swer:




   Computers are projective objects, akin to Rorschach tests, those inkblots de-
signed by a Swiss psychiatrist in order to reconstruct the inner world of respond-
ents on the basis of their interpretations. Also for Bruno Latour (1996) and Donna
Haraway (1999), computers may be seen as a projection screen, but what kind of
images are seen on that screen? According to Bernward Joerges (who is a friend
and a colleague who visited Trento several times in the ’80s) what people see are
Butterflies and Bats.
10   GHERARDI



         Butterflies and bats are common interpretations in the Rorschach tests that
     Joerges uses for interpreting sociological images of technology. Like any proper
     metaphor - Joerges writes - this one is meant to evoke several interpretations. In
     the first place, it stands for the "projectivity" of machine technology, quite in tune
     with Turkle's initial notion that technologies are manifestations of cultural pro-
     jects. Beyond this, I use it to indicate the "dual face," the ambiguity of technology
     as a pervasive motif of social-science interpretations of technology. Last, however,
     bat and butterfly stand for the "fluttering" approach some sociologists take-now
     coquettish and seductive, now frightening and aversive in dealing with the new
     machines.
         Metaphors of the field (either butterflies or bats), supercharged with meaning,
     were put to conceptual uses, as a theoretical resource for a sociological study of
     technology. In 1990 (and before in Romancing the Machine), Joerges was pointing
     at the ‘distance to artefacts’ in sociology. So far (in the late ’80s, beginning of the
     ’90s) sociology has not had much to say on technology per se and distance to arte-
     facts was still characteristic of most sociological studies of technology.
         But at that time STS was about to change it:




        1985, The Social Shaping of Technology; 1986, Mapping the Dynamics of Science
     and Technology; 1987, The Social Construction of Technological Systems. These
     books have been my teddy bears (or my dodoo as my French friends would call
     them) and maybe they have been a generational phenomenon. My group was in-
     troduced to these books by Attilio Masiero, a former colleague of ours who was so
     passionate about them that he transmitted his passion to us; although we have nev-
     er been able to convince him to write a line in STS style (and nor did we!).
        While this trilogy of books were opening a strand of thought based on the met-
     aphor of construction, the reference is of course to Sergio Sismondo and his defini-
     tion of STS as ‘STS looks to how the things it studies are constructed’.
                                                            TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       11



    More or less at the same time, a terrifying reprimand was going around: science
and technology become ‘monsters’, when they sever their connections with the so-
cial conditions of their production (Haraway 1991; Law 1991; Star 1991).




    Another metaphor became an icon of STS and it resonates more with the em-
pirical and methodological reflection that our group was conducting in those years.
I think of labor-atories studies.




   They helped me/us to get rid of the industrial model of work/worker/ technol-
ogy and to see work differently. Scientists negotiated the nature of data and other
results in conversation with each other, working toward results and argument that
could be published. Scientists work, like many other human beings…but also non-
humans work with them and make them work. Sometimes, they go out from the
12   GHERARDI



     laboratory; sometimes they go to the Amazonian rain forest; or, better, the Amazo-
     nian rain forest goes into their lab.
         The early work by Bruno Latour, who visited Rucola a couple of times, had a
     large impact on the way we were developing our approach to knowing in practice
     in those years.




        Science as practice and technology as a social practice are labels grounded in
     symbolic interactionism. In fact the symbolic interactionist approach treats science
     and technology as work, taking place in particular localities, using objects as sym-
     bols that enable work and through work the creation of scientific knowledge and
     technological results. This approach was nearer to our educational background in
     sociology and to our engagement in those years with the theme of organizational
     culture and with the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. Our
     world became richer, full of boundary objects, bandwagons, ecologies of
     knowledge, categories and so on.
        Nevertheless, it was Actor-network theory (with or without the hyphen) that of-
     fered the most powerful and enduring metaphor: a network of heterogeneous ele-
     ments. Maybe it was ambiguity to offer this image a competitive advantage, but for
     sure ANT is the larger of the two contact points between STS and Organization
     Studies.
                                                                TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        13



    The other important contact point was the one between STS and Information
Systems and, within it, with the two communities of Computer Supported Cooper-
ative Work and Participatory Design, who were dealing (in parallel) with the de-
sign of technologies. IS, like other approaches oriented to the study of workplaces,
is interested in the relations between knowledge, the individual, the collective, so-
cial structures and technology. What STS has offered to this area of studies, is an
enlarged understanding of the user and the information system, an awareness of
the importance of practice and the materiality of knowing, notwithstanding a qual-
itative-ethnographic methodology.
    At the crossroad of STS, ANT, IS and OS, there was a very powerful concept,
situated action, that acted as an ‘affiliative object’ (Suchman, 2005). In fact, objects
are not innocent, but fraught with significance for the relations that they material-
ise.




   In the aftermath of ‘ANT and After’ (Law and Hassard, 1999) I dare to say that
we had ‘stormy weather’ full of images such as Collins and Evans third wave:
14   GHERARDI



        Not to mention the high church and the low church of Fuller (some years be-
     fore).




        These houses cut across science and politics, reconceptualising epistemic pro-
     cesses so that all parties can participate at all stages. An Upper house has the pow-
     er to take into account; the lower house has the power to put in order; and both
     together have the power to follow up. I should say that the symbolism of the
     house, of the upper and the lower, of the division of labour, recall a gendered sub-
     text (the story of Thales and the young servant girl) that contrasts with the pres-
     ence within STS of feminist voices and epistemologies.
        For STS in the years 2000s, I have the image of stormy weather. Mine is an im-
     age coming from outside but consider the voices from inside.
        A growing concern for engagement seems to contrast the traditional debates on
     politics: STS becoming repetitive is the worry (or joy?) of Guggenheim and
     Nowotny in 2003, where being repetitive means that for STS there are always fur-
     ther artefacts to deconstruct; STS losing its provocative power is the concern for
     Woolgar. And in a very telling special issue in 2009, entitled ‘Does STS mean
     Business’, Woolgar, Coopmans and Neyland explored the nature and consequenc-
     es of STS coming in contact with Organization and Management studies. In their
     introduction, the authors are more concerned with management studies (and may-
     be that the encounter between STS and management is recent, but the influence of
     STS on organization studies is long lasting, as I have tried to argue so far). But this
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       15



is not the point. I want to stress a change in vocabulary and imagination. In that
special issue, Woolgar and colleagues talk of STS as a set of sensibilities, meaning
that ‘it is unhelpful to construe STS as a unitary set of approaches, methods and
topics’. And in the same issue Lynch calls for a time out.
    During the 2000s we took a time out, and we developed some themes that were
in common and were somehow labelled as STS themes differently, but we avoided
to use a bland version of STS.
    STS have been the humus, the breeding ground, of our theoretical growing up,
but now our group – Rucola (http://www3.unitn.it/rucola/) – is known for the
other acronym of PBS (Practice-based Studies…acronyms are a classic form of so-
cial control, limiting the imagination by offering mechanisms of social ordering, in
Woolgar’s words!). Together with another new ‘brand’ (the aesthetic approach),
Rucola has taking up the theme of what knowledge is, how knowing is collectively
accomplished, how sociomaterial relationships produce social effects, what taste
means for organizational practices…and more generally a search for a non rational-
cognitive view of knowledge and organizations.
    Our preferred image/metaphor is that of ‘texture’.
    The philosophical referent for the concept of texture is the contextualism of the
American philosopher Stephen Pepper: “It is doing and enduring, and enjoying:
making a boat, running a race, laughing at a joke, solving a problem, communi-
cating with a friend”. These acts are composed of interconnected activities with
continuously changing patterns (notice the similarities with a concept of practice).
    The metaphor of “texture” was taken up by a group of scholars whose reflec-
tions were published in a special issue of the Journal of Management Studies, edited
by Robert Cooper and Stephen Fox in 1990: “The key to understanding texture is
the idea of ‘connectedness in action’; this phrase brings out the definitive features
of texture, its endless series of relationships which continually move into each oth-
er”.
    The woven text has a texture that stretches and shrinks, and “to follow the pat-
tern and interlacing of the composition requires the weaver’s art of looping and
knotting”. Weaving, i.e. following the multivalent process that constitutes texture,
is the analytical metaphor most appropriate for its understanding and for linking
text with texture, the semiotic and the material.
16   GHERARDI



        Practising may be considered a mode of ordering the different elements that go
     into a practice. And weaving becomes the metaphor for knowing in practice, since
     knowledge is seen as a collective activity and not as an object.
        Weaving is a traditional female craft/art and the gender subtext is strongly in-
     tended! The fabric of practical knowing and its repair in case of breakdown can
     necessitate different forms of weaving:




        Darning is the art of invisible mending. It is a repair technique. And repair is
     not at the margins of order, waiting to be deployed if something goes wrong. In-
     stead it is a practice at the centre of social order: repair work makes workplaces
     ‘normal’.
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       17



    Patching is the art of remedial mending. Patching is a practice intended to fore-
stall any further damage and embroidering is the art of decorating quilting as a bri-
colage and the art of recycling which does not seek to conceal but instead to his-
toricize continuity through change.




  What I tried to do through this presentation is an old patchwork cover, even if
my cover is made of texts and not of colourful, fancy fabrics.
18   GHERARDI



        Every quilter makes decisions as to what to choose or cut, what to put together
     to obtain good results. I left behind many nice STS images: onions, lizards, aero-
     planes, oncomouses, coyotes, tricksters, simians, cyborgs, monsters…..
        Quilters usually meet to exchange scraps of fabric and patterns, this being also
     an opportunity to communicate, to stay in touch, to build some sort of dialogue. I
     hope that the Trento conference will be a good place for quilters to sew their text
     into a collective quilt.
        In the intricacies of my welcome speech I tried to include a couple of things
     which could prompt further discussion:
             1. that in STS there are recursive images and metaphors and the repetition
                 of these metaphors and their associated imaginaries have social and ma-
                 terial effects;
             2. that STS texts become affiliating objects that connect ideas and imagi-
                 naries in a texture of research practice;
             3. that STS research practice has given momentum to a project of revising
                 sociology’s concept of the actor. The change in this concept is a change
                 in epistemology, moving towards a relational, in-between, intra-action
                 or interstice epistemology whose specificity is the questioning of the
                 knowing, materially embodied and socially embedded subject.

        Thank you.
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       19



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20   GHERARDI



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        Silvia Gherardi University of Trento
        Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics
        Dept. of Sociology and Social Research
        Via Verdi, 26 - 38122 Trento - Italy
        Email: silvia.gherardi@soc.unitn.it
