Laboratory Life
Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts is a 1979 book by sociologists of science Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar.
This influential book in the field of science studies presents an anthropological study of Roger Guillemin's scientific laboratory at the Salk Institute. It advances a number of observations regarding how scientific work is conducted, including descriptions of the complex relationship between the routine lab practices performed by scientists, the publication of papers, scientific prestige, research finances and other elements of laboratory life.
The book is considered to be one of the most influential works in the laboratory studies tradition within Science and Technology Studies. It is inspired but not entirely dependent on the ethnomethodological approach. In turn, it served as the inspiration for Actor-Network Theory (or ANT); many of ANT's core concepts (like transcription, inscription, translation, and the deployment of networks) are present in Laboratory Life.
Read more about Laboratory Life: Introduction and Methodology, An Anthropologist Visits The Laboratory, The Construction of A Fact: The Case of TRF(H), The Microprocessing of Facts, Cycles of Credit, Editions
Famous quotes containing the words laboratory and/or life:
“We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)