You can’t fix what you can’t measure

You can’t fix what you can’t measure is common battle cry of today’s business community. Systems of efficiency and technology are invoked for creating new operating paradigms or to justify the expense of a new system for meeting a business need. The Carson article regarding intelligence testing speaks of this phenomenon as well, from a human capital perspective. If you want to improve the intelligence of a population or allocate resources for a diversely intelligent population, you need a yard stick to measure them. The use of technology to measure intangible aspects of nature or complex systems has been shown to be fraught with uncertainty. The questions must be asked, is the tool measuring what you intend it to measure, are other realities affecting the results of your surveys?

The desire to improve the status quo results in a situation where co-production becomes the driving force, especially as new technologies emerge, such as the ability to treat mental disorders in France due to an emerging technology such as psychoanalysis in the early 1900’s. The intelligence tests that came out of France were originally designed as a diagnostic tool for mental disorders, not as a way to categorize people for military service as occurred in the US much later. The artifact of the test however can survive its original context as a diagnostic, and be applied to other uses as social forces push on it and try to use it to meet their own needs.

Co-production demands that society continue to adapt technologies to the emerging needs of the community, but this does not always mean that the correct tool will be adapted to the correct task. Social scientists must constantly be aware of what the biases in existing tools can create and if we are measuring the correct signal. The difficulty of the military to create to effective mechanisms for research into human ability so they could establish an effective force for WWI is an example of co-production stressing the speed of the implementation of new science. Governance of these new systems can often lag the creation of the technology, and in most cases cannot predict the outcomes in any meaningful manner.

Social scientists need to be aware of these potential conflicts and facilitate the iterations of the co-production. As society pushes the technology forward and technology defines what can be possible in the future, care must be exercised in the application of historical artifacts.

Measuring the tectonic shifts in public-private power and influence

Private funding of research and development has taken a much larger role in the United States over the decades. The values inherent in this shift reflect a shift in motivations as well. While pre-World War II research was much more private, Vannevar Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in an era of post-war, government funded research that would last for decades. The National Science Foundation (NSF) may have been a bastardized hybrid of Bush’s vision, but it served its purpose well for many years. Still, the public value in placing such responsibility in such an organization could have been hotly debated by the populace for years, but it was not. Even today, amid budget cutting nightmare scenarios, research funding is not coming under the same public/political scrutiny as other pieces of public expenditures. Why is that?

The shift toward privatization is one of the reasons for this shift in public sentiment. While the government may still claim to be at the wheel of the spending ship, it is actually the populace and private industry who are the pilots charting the course and the crew working the ship. One model that has worked well over time is that of privatizing profits and socializing the risks. As Sheila Jasanoff might say, this would be a conversation about “legitimacy and meaning”. Who gets to call the shots and who takes responsibility when things go wrong?

This very question plays out in other discussions of privatization. Take the military contracting company Blackwater, for example. Their cavalier treatment of civilians in Middle Eastern war zones has kept American diplomats awake at night and drinking lots of tea during the day to patch things up with the locals. It’s an example of privatizing the profit and socializing the risk.

When private companies are allowed to take out patents on new discoveries, we are privatizing profit. When national or international governments cover the cost of governance of new technologies we are socializing the risk. Private companies may have trade groups and some small amount of self- governance, but generally it is the large governments who set up commissions and foundations to study the risk of new technologies. So where does the public voice come in? How do we decide who calls the shots and who takes the fall?

Over the decades since World War II, the United States has fostered a partnership between private and public institutions with standards set up for examining risk and distributing profits in order to promote scientific breakthroughs. The public and other institutional actors – ie. religions - have had varying degrees of influence in the decision making process, but the shift in power has become accepted over time. As we frame and resolve these philosophical questions, we have come to an accord. Both private and public interests co-produce scientific knowledge and technology within the context of society. While it may be an uncomfortable and contentious peace at times, it is a workable dynamic system, nonetheless. The fact that we recognize and debate the power shift between public and private funding of research and development shows that the system itself is healthy.

The Concept of Stability

The term “stability” is a recurrent theme in these readings which I initially found slightly disconcerting. For example, within the context of comparing co-production to the mangle, Pickering offers that “combination of human goals and practices and material potentialities” go into it, and what comes out is a “somewhat unpredictable transformation of both inputs, reconfigured into a newly stabilized field of action for further ‘dances of agency’ between humans and machines” (Pickering paraphrased by Jasanoff, 24). Jasanoff goes onto describe how the comparison to the mangle is problematic. I suppose there is a small amount of room for fluctuation within the concept of stability (being the ‘dances’ portion of the quote) and she picks up on this, but I find it interesting that she doesn’t explicitly complicate the term itself and all that it implies.

And again in describing Anderson’s persuasive treatise on nation-making (and maintaining): “A successful nation has to be able to produce the idea of nationhood as an emergent, intersubjective property; without this connection of belief, it remains a hollow construct, ruling without assent, and hence unstably” (Jasanoff, 26). It has been argued that the oscillation from Democratic to Republican regimes in the United States has created a certain political “stability”. Would we say that this is beneficial for our society? As policies created one day are typically systematically crushed when a new administration is ushered in. What about visions that believe in a new form of that same country, but different. Competing versions of what it means to be a particular nation are constantly in flux. The power relations within a said nation-state along with international dynamics, and market-based interests in most countries obviously shape who comes out on top, but a singular national identity is never fully achieved. Though certain themes of course cross the aisle in terms of American identity.

In her discussion of sugar cane and resistances to colonial influence, Jasanoff argues, “The Uba cane and its hybrid successor stabilized – indeed naturalized – different regimes of colonial knowledge and power, whose rules they at once incorporated and made invisible” (32). With this statement I begin to see what she implies by stability. By coupling the words stabilized and “naturalized” she thus depicts the way in which stability is employed for a particular purpose to solidify perspectives of power. Though with this and later passages I begin to understand more clearly by what the author views as stability, I am dubious of the concept. By what terms is stability defined? Clearly in the above sense it is defined by most “powerful actors”. I would have liked to read the result of the sugar cane exchange for the native growers and if they continued to produce the Uba strain for their own usage, or if their knowledge of that plant dissipated over time.

Stabilization, still seems to imply a measure of “life of it’s own” attitude. Once a product “stabilizes”, that marketing departments (i.e. human beings, among other actors/influences) aren’t constantly re-shaping the way it is perceived in society so as to maintain alleged stability. (page 38). In comparing ecosystems to the concept of stability, as systems mature, more energy is required to maintain their state as opposed to creating new growth. The theory that ecosystems reach a stable state has been contested and I would agree with this in terms of social systems.

This notion of stability can be also tied to the well-trodden critique of Western reductionist science in reducing everything to a “predictable” knowable pattern of movement (which will also be explored again in Scott next week). The Carson article pointed to a level of reliability of human inputs. Additionally, a lecture I attended this week with a former energy industry executive lamented the engrained habits of engineers who think about solving energy problems in a fixed manner. While stressing the importance of reliability in electrical service, I couldn’t help but ponder how “stable” a system which depends on geopolitical upheaval at every turn could possibly be.

It seems rather finicky to create an entire blog post about the concept of stability, but I think it is related to predictability, uniformity, standardization and all the rest. The idea that anything residing in the social realm is stable doesn’t necessarily cover-up other ways of seeing as much as downplays them in a broad sense. A lot more could be said on this topic, but space is limited. In this post I do not mean to portray Jasanoff’s view of stability as simple, but rather, to think about what the term itself implies within a societal context.

Explaining Co-Production

Co-production is a simple, yet powerful idea. Tomorrow, I'll be talking about this weeks readings, but as prelude, I would like to discuss what exactly Sheila Jasanoff means by co-production, how it can be used to improve STS scholarship, and common pitfalls.

Co-production, at is core, is “the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it.” (Jasanoff, pg 2). What this means explicitly is that scientific knowledge and technology are produced by people and institutions, with inbuilt biases, political motives, and generally imperfect understanding. At the same time, science and technology legitimate and modify the power of the state and other institutions in critical ways. Telling only one side of the story, for example, presenting science as a purely social product with no relation to external reality, or explaining the economy as the simply mechanical workings of technology, do harm to the subject.

The goal of co-production is to possess explanatory power about how new objects and phenomenon come into existence, how controversies are created and resolved, how science and technology can be made intelligible across time, space, and culture, and finally how science and technology in particular, are made legitimate and meaningful.

Jasanoff divides co-production into two major branches. Constitutive co-production is concerned with “the ways that stability is created and maintained”. This branch is heavily influenced by the work of Foucault, and includes scholars such as Bruno Latour, who's Actor-Network Theory premises an equality between technology and human, natural and artificial, in terms of the role they can play. Anderson and Scott describe how nation-states are the product of ideas, in terms of convincing people to follow a flag as aided by mass media, and how they impose power through technological grids.

Interactional co-production is more concerned with epistemology, how we know what we know, how controversies are resolved, and credibility determined. Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump is the seminal work in this area, exploring how in their era Boyle and Hobbes were both natural and political philosophers, but Boyle was note-worthy for creating in his air pump expriments and the Royal Society, a means by which strangers could be made to trust the validity of scientific knowledge. Science becomes a form of politics. Merton and Polanyi study the structure of the “republic of science,” while sociologists of science use boundary work and core sets to delineate different fields. Langdon Winner's politics of technology explains how large technological systems impose their own structure onto society. Feminist scholars like Donna Haraway have done great work showing how theories of primate evolution embody the social norms and expectations of researchers more than reality. A profound ambivalence towards modernity, and the power that science has given to a small group of actors to shape society characterizes the vast majority of interactional scholarship.

The very diversity of major works Jasanoff lists as co-productionists shows it scope. The ambition of co-production encompasses every part of society, but it also tries to remain evenhanded, and know its limits. Co-production as an idiom, not a complete and absolute theory. Science and society are not co-produced in universal, repeating patterns, each instance much be properly situated in its historical context, and should draw from other theories. We cannot simply state that something is 'co-produced' and leave it at that empty holism. Similarly, it is not predictive or prescriptive, but with its superior ability to resolve questions at the intersection of science and society, co-production can improve work in history, anthropology, science and technology studies, political theory, and moral philosophy.

The modern world as we know it is one defined by scientific knowledge and technological artifacts. But science and technology are not givens, they are influenced by cultural and political institutions, which are themselves dependent on science and technology, and so on all the way down. The goal of co-production is insight into this complex, and absolutely fundamental process.

Ezrahi and Knowledge

How are knowledge claims voiced in society?  Who voices them?  How is knowledge gained and what qualities does it have in its transmission from one person to another?  What is the role of power and authority in creating and disseminating these knowledge claims?  Ezrahi’s piece approaches these questions from a largely historical/political angle, charting the development of claims to understand reality through four stages:  a “wisdom” paradigm; a “knowledge” paradigm; an “informational paradigm”; and what he refers to as an “outformational” paradigm.  Ezrahi presents these stages as a progressive “alienation of the means of knowing from personality,” in which the understanding of reality is essentially democratized and de-personalized (in a singular sense) in each successive stage.  The stage he identifies as the one we are currently inhabiting, outformation, represents something like a consensus reality (or perhaps a competing set of consensus realities) that immerse an observer in a constructed world that orients them toward a set of shared fictions through which knowledge is created and political decisions are formed.

 I have to say I enjoyed this chapter.  Overall, Ezrahi’s conceptualization of knowledge and authority in each successive stage is intuitively understandable and accurate, in the sense that it can serve as a framework through which many of his assertions can be further explored.  His coining of “outformation” is witty and encapsulates his characterization of the current knowledge-period pretty well.  I was a little disappointed as I felt that he somewhat abandons his pursuit of the implications that outformation will have on the way we determine “correct” policy and perform politics, but it is also understandable due to his piece being more descriptive in nature.

With that said, his article lacked an exploration of two important points:  the role of new media in this process of outformation, and a connection between the progression of his four stages and markets.  The first is forgivable, due to the book being published in 2003 when the full impact of the Internet and other newer technologies was yet to be felt.  Although democratizing, the Internet facilitates a balkanization of information and, when combined with infotainment, creates a fertile ground for different outformations to spring up.

The second, which he hints at in his discussion of high-cost and low-cost realities, exhibits market logic in that knowledge acquisition costs for the majority of the citizenry drop in each successive stage.  In the wisdom stage, there is essentially no other way to come by knowledge than through many years of experiencing the world.  Knowledge is also very personal, and knowledge for one may not be easily translatable to another.  Acquisition costs are high in that the barrier to translating knowledge from one to another and the time taken to gain that knowledge is formidable.  In the “knowledge” stage, the barriers to translating knowledge from one person to another are overcome as a shared scientific language is developed, but the time required to gain that knowledge is still sizeable.  In the “information” stage, the time factor is heavily reduced and knowledge becomes much more affordable for the vast majority of people, but the framework within which to understand and place this knowledge is still lacking.  In the final “outformation” stage, this last hurdle is overcome as the framework required to lend meaning to knowledge is provided by infotainment and popular culture.  In each successive stage, the cost of transmitting knowledge, gaining knowledge, and giving meaning to that knowledge is successively reduced as to become more easily affordable to the vast majority of people.

To use an analogy, it’s a bit like a fast food company.  Creating the food, shipping the food, and contextualizing the food by branding is provided to the customer at a lower cost than if the customer were to create the food, ship the food, and create a brand for the food themselves.  In much the same way as fast food, though, a steady diet of this type of knowledge leaves a person sickly unless it is supplemented by something more wholesome.

Although the idea needs some work, in a sense what Ezrahi was describing in the article could be summed up as the McDonaldization of knowledge, leading to the creation of “McKnowledge” if you will.  His progression of stages represents the application of market logic to knowledge sources, in that cost barriers are lowered in each successive stage which leads to the dissemination of a demanded but, some would say, an ultimately deleterious product.  The effect that it can have on the body politic, with which I believe Ezrahi would agree, reflects the effect that fast food can have on the health of the human body.

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.