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.