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2.4 The ‘contra’: Dangers of informed observation
In science studies, two different approaches to informed observation are common. One is
‘native observation’, that is a sociological observation conducted by scientists who previously
belonged to the field under study and undertook a biographical turn, e.g. from being a physicist
to becoming a sociologist. This approach has been surprisingly widespread in science studies of
the last three decades. The other approach is the expected one. Sociologists acquire scientific
knowledge that is relevant in the field under study in the course of their investigation. Being
trained sociologists, our own application of the principle of informed observation must take the
latter form.
Our research interest is best described as neoinstitutionalist. We are interested in how
institutional conditions of action (as provided by funding programs, science policy, law, formal
organisations, informal rules within scientific communities etc.) affect the production of
scientific knowledge. For example, we ask how institutional conditions of actions affect
interdisciplinary collaboration (Laudel 1999; 2001), or how the institutional change that
accompanied German unification affected links between basic research and applications (Gläser
2000).
In order to understand the impact of macrostructures such as institutions, it is not sufficient to
study them in only one situation. Since institutions are only one of a variety of factors shaping
human behaviour (as the new institutionalism concedes), than they must be studied in different
settings, i.e. functioning under different conditions, being overlapped by varying other
conditions, etc. Investigating institutions therefore requires comparative studies across several
organisations and fields.
The choice of an informed approach in comparative studies means that the investigator has to
become familiar with a variety of different scientific fields at once. This burdens a genuinely
sociological investigation with a significant and potentially infinite amount of autodidactic
learning of several advanced sciences, an approach which inevitably puts a significant strain on
every investigation. There is a significant risk that too much time is spent on the scientific
preparation of the investigation, and that the sociological aspects of the investigation suffer. A
second significant risk involved is that of ‘going native’, i.e. of unconsciously accepting the
fields’ basic cultural and behavioural assumptions which usually ‘come with the science’. Two
sociologists who conducted ethnographic studies of scientific practice regarded this risk so grave
that they preferred not to acquire scientific knowledge at all:
We take the apparent superiority of the members of our laboratory in technical matters to be insignificant, in
the sense that we do not regard prior cognition (or in the case of an ex-participant, prior socialisation) as a
necessary prerequisite for understanding scientists’ work. This is similar to an anthropologist’s refusal to bow
before the knowledge of a primitive sorcerer. For us, the dangers of “going native” outweigh the possible
advantages of ease of access and rapid establishment of rapport with participants. (Latour and Woolgar
[1979] 1986: 29)
Convention