10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17298
application/pdf
2038-3460
17298
1
en
Paolo Volonté
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Philippe Sormani, Respecifying Lab Ethnography: An Ethnomethodological Study of Experimental Physics, Ashgate, 2014
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Book Reviews
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
167-170
TS
Paolo Volonté
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17298
167
Politecnico di Milano
2038-3460
1
en
170
Philippe Sormani, Respecifying Lab Ethnography: An Ethnomethodological Study of Experimental Physics, Ashgate, 2014
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17298/16167
7
Book Reviews                                                                167
thors recall a few different, and sometimes opposite, positions on the
medicalization of childbirth coming from feminist scholars; as explicitly
stated, however, Nicolson and Fleming decided “not to interrupt the flow
of the narrative with theoretical digressions or engagement with the work
of other scholars” (7), and only briefly mention the controversies and
conflicts following the changing attitude towards the fetus.
    In conclusion, Imaging and Imagining the Fetus constitutes a valuable
example of the messy path that leads to the emergence and stabilization
of a new technology. Following Pickering's framing of research as a pat-
tern of modeling, resistance, and emergence (1995), Nicolson and Fleming
convincingly describe the complex entanglement of personal skills and in-
terests, social and political context, technical and financial resources, as
well as fortuitous encounters, fundamental for a technological innovation
to be successful.

References
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
    London, Free Association Press.
Pickering, A. (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Chicago,
    University of Chicago Press.




                                     ***


   Philippe Sormani
Respecifying Lab Ethnography: An Ethnomethodological Study of Experi-
mental Physics, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 278

Paolo Volonté Politecnico di Milano

    This book presents a laboratory study based on the conviction that la-
boratory studies have failed up to now to achieve their goal. According to
the author, laboratory studies’ failure is “the failure to describe any partic-
ular discipline of the natural sciences in its constitutive practices” (16). The
very constructivist approach that has characterized lab studies from their
beginning contributed to such failure, because it drove to interpret labor-
atory practices in terms of concepts alien to them. There arose the ten-
dency to ignore any self-instruction in the enquired domain of research
practice, and the interpretively analytic relevancies distanced themselves
from the practically ordered ones. To avoid such trap, Sormani’s study
accomplishes a change in orientation lead by ethnomethodology. Its cen-
tral concern is to recover the local production of social order in a physics
168                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

laboratory for the study of superconductivity. In a rigorous ethnometh-
odological approach, it focuses on the description of local order produc-
tion instead of on a theoretical interpretation of the observed setting.
    The setting is a laboratory for scanning tunneling microscopy of com-
plex superconducting compounds. For human beings this is a place
where special electronic microscopes are used to scan the surface of se-
lected materials (superconductors) and infer their topographic and elec-
tronic properties. At the time of the research, the lab hosted six low tem-
perature scanning tunneling microscopy facilities operated by PhD stu-
dents, post-docs and senior researchers under the management and con-
trol of an operating lab chief and a lab director, for a total amount of 15
members at the peak of its activity.
    In accordance with the ethnomethodological approach, Sormani’s
study aims at describing the field under scrutiny in its own terms. The
book gives a detailed description of how work is conducted by lab mem-
bers within the lab, through which methods and practices, under which
circumstances and contingencies. It describes how members secure the
locally achieved results of their day-to-day work in a way that allows them
to generate accurate measurements. Moreover, since it “makes explicit
the distinctive ‘ethno-methods’ of practicing experimental physics in (and
as) the highlighted domain” (1), it corresponds to an ethnography of the
indicated laboratory. Therefore, it aims at contributing to the ethnometh-
odological reinterpretation of ethnographic methods, namely to what in
Grafinkel’s terminology is called a “respecification” of the practices for
the production of social order (Garfinkel 1991). Ethnography belongs to
those practices. This ethnomethodological study of a physics lab is at the
same time a contribution to the exhibition of the Lebenswelt origins of
lab ethnography as such.
    From a methodological point of view, the book tackles a widespread
opposition in ethnomethodology between the recourse to the technology
of video recording and the practical engagement in the technical activity
that is enquired. By means of a combination between the use of video
analysis to produce a procedural description of microscopic experimenta-
tion and the self-instructive engagement in the process, Sormani achieved
with a long-term participant observation a broad and depth understand-
ing of the practices, methods, routines and phenomena involved in the
lab work. The researcher can exhibit the lab practices “by having them
produced, filmed, and described ‘from within’”, in a research process
(“film it, whilst you do it”) that “may be best termed a practice-based vid-
eo analysis” (15).
    The book is structured in three parts. Part I aims at describing the la-
boratory activities by making “one step back” (233) with respect to the
interpretative approach of lab ethnographies. The laboratory setting is in-
vestigated as a self-explicating setting and lab work is described in its own
terms, i.e. according to the narrative that members themselves share.
Moreover, lab work is described along with the ethnographer’s activities
Book Reviews                                                                169
of talking and observing, which are subjected to a reflective analysis that
shows their similarity to the members’ activities. Part II reports the au-
thor’s technical self-instruction in scanning tunneling microscopy and
“describes how a valid, reliable, and manifestly objective measurement
could be obtained through microscopic experimentation” (103). Practic-
ing the practices constitutive of scanning tunneling microscopy proves
indispensable to describe the lab work in its own terms. The practical en-
gagement in the lab activities leads Sormani to discover the “hands on! /
hands off!” distinction that the lab members employ to describe the di-
vide between the practicing experimentalist’s involvement with the facili-
ty and his or her colleague’s retreat in the observing attitude of those who
see others doing it. This distinction inhabits the laboratory setting rather
than characterizing the divide between members and ethnographers. Fi-
nally, part III hosts the report of the practice-based video analysis.
Thanks to its composition of filming from within while engaging in mi-
croscopic experimentation, the practice-based video analysis is presented
here as the only methodological approach that fits adequately with the
practical distinction between the researchers’ collegial “hands off!” and
experimental “hands on!” orientation. If doing it yourself is the only way
to understand how to do it in microscopic experimentation, the only use-
ful video is the one filmed while doing it.
    Sormani’s book is a sound and consequent application of the ethno-
methodological approach to lab studies. As such, it delivers a double-
sided contribution to the field. On the ethnomethodology side, the self-
instructive circle it opens up engages in a pre-analytic endeavour that
challenges Michael Lynch’s post-analytic programme (Lynch 1993). Sor-
mani, by resorting Garfinkel's requirements, attempts to give up the aca-
demic tradition of assuming an analytic focus before engaging the field on
the base of issues discussed in the literature, either related to the philo-
sophical and historical study of science or to its social study or to both.
On the other side, the book brings into contention the established Sci-
ence and Technology Studies’ approach to lab ethnographies. From this
point of view, it is a stimulating challenge to STS routines, that it criti-
cizes severely, censuring the “multifaceted interest” and “theoretical ec-
lecticism” (248) that prevents STS from engagement with first-order prac-
ticalities. Yet, precisely the focus on practices and first-order practicalities
makes the confrontation with STS a little bit schematic. As laboratory
practice is at the core of the proposed ethnography, and given that lan-
guage is always theory-laden, a confrontation with practice theories, from
Bourdieu to Shove, could have improved the broad significance of this
study. More in general, Sormani’s argumentation is hard to follow and to
grasp for those who do not share the ethnomethodological stance. A wid-
er confrontation with non-ethnomethodological literature would have
helped in making the rich and exciting results more meaningful for the
broader audience.
170                                                             Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

References
Garfinkel H. (1991) Respecification: Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Ac-
   countable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as
   of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society (I) an Announcement
   of Studies, in G. Button (ed.), Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences,
   Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 10-19.
Lynch M. (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and
   Social Studies of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.



                                     ***

   Janet Vertesi
Seeing Like a Rover. How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of
Mars. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 304

Massimo Mazzotti University of California, Berkeley


    This is a book that I read with pleasure. It captured my imagination.
And, I must admit, it wasn’t fun when one of the rovers died. Alone. In
the Martian desert. By that point, I had become almost convinced that I
too could “see like a rover.”
    “After you’ve worked with the team for a while,” says an informant,
“you kind of learn to see like a Rover.” The team is the Mars Exploration
Rover Team, and this book studies what does it mean to say that a human
member of the team can learn to see how a machine. To address this
question, Vertesi take us on a step-by-step journey through the image-
making practices that produce those familiar reddish Martian landscapes.
The outcome is a well-crafted, highly textured ethnographic account of
how the team works with the digital images sent back by Martian rovers.
The reader learns how these scientists and engineers make sense of the
images, manipulate them to make them “more objective,” and use them
to orient their action at a distance. A very long distance indeed.
    Vertesi does a great job in mobilizing relevant work in the history of
science and science studies, centering each chapter on a powerful insight.
Her story vividly reminds us of the theory-ladenness of observation, the
conventional and local nature of objectivity, and of the fact that scientific
images, including photographs, are always and necessarily constructed. It
reminds us that instrument calibration is an eminently social process, one
that is as much about people as it is about machines. On this particular
point, Vertesi goes beyond the narrative of alternative kinds of objectivi-
ty, to engage with the process of calibration as integrating machine work
and human judgment, in a way that gestures interestingly toward recent
