Customer Reviews

Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory (Studies in Ethnomethodology)

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Lynch's study of neurobiology is unique among the "laboratory studies" books that I've read in that Lynch refuses to make broad conclusions about the epistemological status of science in general. Whether this comes from what he got out of his data or prior methodological commitments is a little unclear, although it seems like laboratory studies somehow always end up supporting the author's prior convictions. There is a lot of (almost) raw data in the book, especially in regards to recorded conversations from the lab. These transcripts are very interesting. So is Lynch's treatment of laboratory science as shop work. Don't look to this book for the answer to the question of whether or not science is socially constructed, though. Lynch seems to think that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. He gives science more credit than most of the other laboratory studies I've read, but this may, as I said, come from prior convictions. I think that interpretation is given support by Lynch's commitment from the beginning to the idea that the "anthropologist" in the lab must know at least something about the science being studied. Compare with Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life (they have a very different view both methodologically and interpretively) and Karin Knorr-Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge.