Abstract
Nanotechnology has become a watchword in many scientific circles, including the social scientific circles that resolve themselves to keep close tabs on the frontiers of the interfaces of science and society. The term is a catchall that has come to encompass any research or engineering that operates in the scale of nanometers (in increments of one billionth of a meter). Nanoscale research has been both celebrated and vilified for its potential applications. Nanotechnologies that could be used to treat disease at the cellular level, for example, could conceivably be converted into stealthy and deadly weapons in the wrong hands. Instrumental Community is simultaneously a history of this consequential new field, and an attempt by Cyrus Mody to contribute to sociological theories of science and technology.
As Mody explains, the science of the very small predates the coinage of the label “nanotechnology” (among crystallographers, for example), though its current formulation has been shaped by the invention and applications of probe microscopy. The dizzying variety of probe microscopy variants and spinoffs (which Mody handles deftly)—scanning tunneling microscopy, atomic force microscopy, Kelvin probe force microscopy, and so on—have in common a physical probe that scans the surface of a sample, producing nanoscale images, and in some cases yielding atomic resolution. The development of the scanning tunneling microscope, the first probe microscope, earned Gerd Bining and Heinrich Rohrer the Nobel Prize in physics in 1986. Instrumental Community is largely a history of probe microscopy (as the book’s subtitle suggests) and how its practitioners forged both the instruments and the networks that gave rise to nanotechnology.
That the developers and early practitioners of probe microscopy had to build machines and networks of people to use them is the source of Mody’s concept of “instrumental community.” To Mody, instrumental communities are networks of scientists who are connected by their common interest in an instrument that has potential applications for their research. Instrumental communities both develop technologies and develop research agendas derived from those technologies. Hence, the technologies become instrumental to research programs, and the “instrumental” in instrumental communities takes on a double meaning: a network of researchers who develop a technology (i.e., an instrument), and who also come to depend on that same technology to do meaningful research in other substantive areas (i.e., the technology becomes instrumental).
While Mody’s assessment of early probe microscopy as an instrumental community is compelling, the extent to which it adds to sociology’s understanding of scientific research is questionable. “Instrumental communities” are defined similarly to what sociologists have conceptualized as scientific specializations for decades. However, while sociologists have tended to focus on the social dynamics of the development and institutionalization of research topics broadly defined (making few theoretical distinctions between applied and basic research), Mody places particular emphasis on the relevance of probe microscopy as an instrument, arguing that the applicability of this technique to myriad research programs is what accounts for the characteristics of its network of scientists as simultaneously innovators and adopters of probe microscopes. But it is unclear whether, and to what extent a research community organized around a technology differs in structure or function from a research community organized around a theory or idea, or even if the two can be distinguished either empirically or theoretically. Mody seems to imply that they cannot, stating that probe microscopy “blurs any distinction between science and technology” (p. 6), but if this is the case, then the emphasis that he places on it as an instrument (assumedly in contrast to an idea or a theory) is dubious. It may be that Mody would consider scientific communities organized around a theory as similarly “instrumental,” in both senses that he uses this term, but he does not say this. In any event, his claims that an instrumental community “is a network of individuals who view their involvement with a particular type of instrument and/or instrumentality as ratifying their connection to other nodes in the network” (p. 10), and that probe microscopists “saw themselves as doing something in common with other probe microscopists around the world” (p. 10) is a basic assumption made about scientific specializations by sociologists, and does not contribute substantively to our understanding of their dynamics.
However, Mody makes a more specific claim about the contributing factors to the success of scientific specializations which are a welcome corrective to recent research on scientific “movements” (Frickel and Gross 2005; Parker and Hackett 2012) that claims their success is a function of the extent to which these communities can create consensus and stymie outside perspectives challenging this consensus. These studies tend to focus narrowly on the earliest stages of development of specializations and ignore processes of diffusion after basic premises have been institutionalized. In contrast, Mody demonstrates that the success of probe microscopy was tied directly to its flexibility. Probe microscopy became standard fare in many different sciences, not because there was wide consensus as to how to use it or even what it produced, but because scientists in other specializations could adapt it to their own needs, and assign to it their own meanings as they saw fit. This highlights the fact that scientists partake in multiple specializations simultaneously, and these inherent overlaps, and the inter-network connections that they imply, must be accounted for in any study of what contributes to the continued success of specializations beyond their fragile early stages. Proponents of actor-network theory (some of whom Mody cites but does not discuss in detail) have studied how facts and artifacts are adopted and adapted according to users’ interests, but this literature (usually associated with explaining the social construction of scientific facts) is seldom connected to the fate of scientific specializations. Mody provides a tantalizing link between these two literatures, but his failure to engage them leaves the task of integration to future researchers. If anyone proves up to the challenge, Instrumental Community will be essential reading.