What is Co-Production’s place in STS?

Methodologies restrict the observer/researcher in what they can see while limiting the possibilities of what can/will be done in the future. This idea, which is relatively new and typically appears as a reaction to misgivings about mainstream methodology, seems to exist across many fields of inquiry. Take Political Science’s Third Debate that faults positivist approaches for a seemingly narrowing the understanding of international relations while keeping the periphery (the voiceless) out of theories. It seems that STS has its own internal debate that can be seen Jasanoff’s co-productionist work.

Interestingly enough, Jasanoff explicitly states how her work is compatible with post-structuralists in political science in regards to how invisible forces (knowledge/expertise and man-made objects) are seen to influence authority and power.  The co-production approach is founded on the notion that how we (society) choose to know and represent the world cannot be separated from how we choose to live in the world. Before co-production, Jasonoff claims there was a lack of vocabulary available to adequately unravel technology and science from power and society. She affirms that her co-production approach provides the resources needed to do exactly this.

What does co-production allow to be brought into STS that was not allowed before? In other words, is co-production even worth being it’s own separate methodology?

In the chapters she wrote in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, Jasonoff examined the function of identity and imagination in regards to science and technology--individual cultures seem to stand the tide of technology driven globalization in the face of other exclaiming the flattening of the world. Such objects cannot be ignored. How does technology influence identity and imagination? Jasonoff provide several illustrations of this in use, two being:

Benedict Anderson How some important technology can be used to train imagination in creating sense of nationalism (us vs. them). 

Michael Foucault  How science and technology are important for the exercise of state power and enforcing certain types of identity.

In his chapter, Carson used a comparative co-productionist approach to describe how science was seen in America as a way to remove prejudice in settling social problems thanks to science’s objectivity and logic. Why was this important? Post WWI America was filled with ever increasing immigrant populations. Bureaucrats wanted (needed?) a way to better organize and distribute social goods in an equable way that upheld their interpretation of democracy—intelligence tests flourished. This is in contrast to France where such social fluxes did not exist and who held a different view of democracy’s role in providing opportunity—intelligence tests failed.

Identity; Communities; Power; Nation-states; Democratic bureaucracies. The interaction between science/technology with social structures is complex to say the least. Some in STS give technology precedence over how society will incorporate and be influenced by new technology. Others say society has supreme role over technology. Both methodologies provide either a distorted view or half-a-view. Co-production—when done correctly with neither side receiving dominance—can provide a complete picture of the interaction between science/technology and society.