Download Laboratizing and Delaboratizing the World: Changing Sociological

Michael Guggenheim
[email protected]
www.migug.net
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Accepted for publication, to appear in: History of the Human Sciences, 2012.
Please quote according to actual publication. This version is a pre-publication version.
Laboratizing and Delaboratizing the World: Changing Sociological Concepts for Places of Knowledge Production Introduction
In recent years, Science Studies and Actor-Network Theory have expanded the notion of the
laboratory. For example, Bruno Latour writes: ‘having extended laboratory life to all of our
collective existence, it seems that, as the project of modernism gradually exhausts itself, there is
now no fact that is not also a cause or a claim’ (Latour 2004, 24). Similarly, Miller and O’Leary in
an article that analyses “the factory as laboratory par excellence” claim that ‘Science and Technology
Studies need to take a much wider view of what counts as a laboratory. [They] need to clear away
the lingering demarcationism that characterizes the discipline and address those practices that
seek to act upon and transform the world in specific and relatively bounded locales, even if this
takes place outside the laboratories populated by physicists, chemists and the like’ (Miller and
O’Leary 1994, 470).
In this article, I would like to examine this extension of the laboratory historically. I follow the
use of the term laboratory in sociology and science studies and how it is employed as a tool to
differentiate specific places of knowledge production. However, unlike Miller and O’Leary, I do
not interpret the challenge of what might be termed the ‘laboratization’ of the world as one of
overcoming demarcationism. Rather, I see contemporary practices of laboratization as a return to
an earlier metaphorical use of the term laboratory that seeks to transfer the epistemic authority of
science to other fields. Instead of participating in this transfer of authority, I want to historically
understand the laboratization (and delaboratization) of the world by sociology as well as
introducing a number of alternate concepts which allow for the more precise analysis of different
forms of research and how they relate to their location.
At the same time, this is not a history of laboratory experimentation in sociology. Also, it is well
understood that the supposed difference between lab- and non-lab produced knowledge is often
not empirically sustainable. I am merely interested in the varying uses of the term laboratory and
its varying metaphorical levels. The goal of this exercise is thus analytic. It is a case study of
when, why and how sociology uses descriptions of a one kind of place to describe other places.
André Kieserling has noted that “modern society has produced a rule for swear words in which
its own structures are mirrored” (Kieserling 2004, 128). The rule consists in attributing words
from one sphere to another sphere, such as when describing religion with the words of the
economy (priests as accumulating capital) or the law with the words of religion (judges as priests)
etc. The same rule works with specific places: One needs simply to describe a university as a
factory (for producing graduates) or a court as a market (for bargaining for sentences). The
extended use of the term laboratory is another instance of this rule, but with far more complex
outcomes. As I show, the laboratory (within sociology) can be used in a metaphorical way to
both justify and critique sociology’s practices and the metaphorical extension of the term varies
heavily over time.
My objection to the metaphorical use of the laboratory is not an exercise in controlling language.
I do not want to limit the sociological limitation by banning metaphors. Rather, I want to
highlight a specific career of a specific metaphor that has in recent times resurfaced, and that
obscures rather than clarifies sociological theorizing of the relationship between place and
epistemology. I propose new terms myself to describe some of what the authors discussed here
call a laboratory, but I consider these terms to be more precise and differentiating.
My paper develops the argument in two parts. First, I begin by giving a definition of the
laboratory as a result of a process to differentiate a controlled inside from an uncontrolled
outside, thereby producing both a notion of placeless knowledge and the possibility of
inconsequential action. Second, I analyse the history of the use of the term laboratory in
sociology historically in three steps. In the first phase, until the Second World War, several
notions of laboratory existed next to each other. Apart from the standard definition as the
counterpart to the field, several other notions of laboratory existed, that conflated the field and
the lab, thus leaving the laboratory without its other, placeness and consequential action. My
thesis is that the term laboratory in these instances was used in a metaphorical way. These early
sociologists used the term to indicate that sociology was a science too, with an object that could
be studied empirically. They did not attempt to separate an inside from an outside in order to
allow for placelessness and inconsequential actions.
Only after the Second World War, in a second step, the lab-field dichotomy was established in
the common sense of the term. Real laboratory experiments were done, but also critically
examined. It was understood that sociology would in most cases not profit from becoming a
laboratory science and the term field became much more important. Because the laboratory was
now real, but appeared not very suitable to many sociologists, the metaphorical invocation of the
laboratory disappeared.
Third, since the 1990ies, following the success of laboratory studies, the notion of lab seems to
return to a more metaphorical use. As I will show, this happens primarily to extend the scope and
methods of STS to other places in society. I discuss four different kinds of expansions and
contend that they return to a metaphorical use. In order to clarify these uses, I propose for two
of these uses non-metaphorical and more precise concepts, the locatory and the unilatory. My
discussion is restricted mostly to American sociology and does not purport to be a real history of
the lab-field distinction in sociology, but a conceptual clarification.
The Definition of the Lab
Here is my definition of a laboratory. The laboratory is the result of a procedure that separates
between an outside, an environment that is considered negligible for some epistemic claim or
technological invention and an inside, a (partly) controlled environment that is considered
relevant for this claim or invention. The lab is not so much a closed space, but a procedure that
often results in a space with the properties to separate controlled inside from uncontrolled
outside. Control means not necessarily physical control but a procedure whereby data and objects
are managed to behave in a way the scientist wishes to. The separation between inside and
outside allows for the two central features of the lab, placelessness and consequence-free
research.
Before I elaborate this definition, let me compare it with other definitions of the laboratory. My
definition of the laboratory is based on central tenets of laboratory studies, most notably, it is
procedural and praxeologic and moves away from questions of validity (Knorr Cetina 2001,
8232). This definition also shares with laboratory studies a stress on the interventionist character
of the laboratory and the idea that the laboratory is an assemblage of technologies and practice.
But my definition is analytical and it does not try, as historians do, attempt to capture every
historical notion of the term ‘laboratory’ (Gooday 2008). More specifically, it allows to
differentiate laboratories from rhetorical invocations of the term ‘laboratory’. My goal is to
differentiate the laboratory from what Karin Knorr Cetina has called ‘the laboratory perspective’,
i.e. seeing the world as lab (Knorr Cetina 2001, 8237). To do so, the only, but crucial, difference
to laboratory studies is that this definition aims at differentiating the laboratory from other places
of knowledge production exactly because it is a place of a highly specific form of material
interventions. Most obviously, the other side of the distinction is the field. The field is an
environment for epistemic claims without a distinction between a controlled inside and a noncontrolled outside. Because of the lack of this distinction the borders of a field are blurry and
have to be defined by the researcher.
Let me look more precisely at the two defining main features of the laboratory. First, because of
the distinction between inside and outside, the laboratory is a mechanism for generalization, since
epistemic claims or objects derived from labs can be extended to other non-controlled
environments. This is why Robert Kohler calls a laboratory placeless (Kohler 2008, 766). More
precisely, the laboratory is a mechanism for generalization, because it consists of two parts. One
part, the lab, is stable, and the other part, the knowledge object, for example a rat, is unstable.
The controlled environment is stabilized and known beforehand. It is a proper technology in the
sense, that its stable qualities always produce the same output with the same input. If a rat runs
with different speeds in a treadmill, the speed difference cannot be attributed to the treadmill but
the rat.
Second, a laboratory allows what Krohn and Weyer called ‘consequence free research’ (Krohn
and Weyer 1994, 181). They observe that science works with the promise of ‘containment’. Both
the practical operations in the lab, as well as epistemic operations of science are supposed to be
without real world consequences and reversible. As operations in the lab, an experiment, if it
goes wrong, poses no danger to the outside world (obviously, if it works, it maybe implemented,
and then change the world, but the experiment itself does not). The lab as containment for
inconsequential actions is also a source of unease and is constantly put in doubt. The unease is
the source for an endless stream of fictional accounts about what happens if the objects cannot
be controlled, escape from the lab and become consequential.
The lab as a container for inconsequential actions only exists, because scientists created
boundaries that separate the lab from the world. This does not imply that a lab is necessarily a
room or a building, but it refers to the fact that a lab has to be created by scientists and that
containment needs work to render actions inconsequential.
Both of these features are not mere rhetorical tricks, they cannot be achieved by writing. Mere
generalization or mere claims that actions are inconsequential do not indicate a lab. These two
features depend on scientific operations that first have to establish a boundary between an
uncontrolled outside and a controlled inside and then operate on an object inside the laboratory.
After these steps have been accomplished the laboratory has to be reduced slowly in order to test
whether the facts and objects remain stable without it. This includes the attribution of anomalies
that occur outside the lab to the particular circumstances and not to the lab. This step is only
possible if before, in the lab, a proper distinction between lab and object has taken place.
Only after these operations have been completed it becomes possible to generalize knowledge
claims and render them placeless. Only then it is possible to claim that the actions are
inconsequential. Since a laboratory is a technology, it is also possible to search for its failure if
either generalisation or containment fails. Latour calls these steps ‘chains of translations’ or
‘networks’ and it is these chains of translations that stabilise facts outside the lab (Latour 1987).
Mere generalizations are non-stabilised claims.
This definition is not tied to any specific notion of science. A lab is neither needed for science,
nor are laboratories always used for science in the strong sense. Labs are mechanisms to control
knowledge objects and allow for inconsequential actions, which can even take place outside
science, as for example in industry. Thus my use of the term is compatible with the uses of the
term before the 19th century as described in Klein (Klein 2008). Neither placelessness nor
inconsequential action are absolute terms, but obviously form a continuum. Different labs may
be able to construe different levels of placelessness and inconsequential action. The term
laboratory is a relative term in a space defined by a continuum (Kohler 2002). Let me now look at
how the historical use of the term laboratory relates to this definition.
Extending the Notion of Laboratory in Early Sociology
In early sociology the term laboratory was used regularly. The standard notion was used by
several authors (Chapin 1917a, Chapin 1917b; Kellor 1901). They were influenced by
neighbouring disciplines such as criminology, and tried to turn sociology into an experimental
science. But beside the standard notion, varying other notions of laboratories flourished. Most
notably in Chicago, the city, and the field in general, were seen as laboratories.
For the case of Chicago sociology, a range of texts on the use of the term laboratory already exist
(Gieryn 2006; Egloff 2007; Gross 2009; Gross and Krohn 2005). From this literature one might
get the impression that the extended use of the term laboratory was specific for the Chicago
School and for the city as a place of research in particular. However, the extension of the
laboratory in Chicago was but one example of a then common extension of the term laboratory
in sociology. My discussion also notably differs from the one of Thomas Gieryn (Gieryn 2006).
In his analysis of the Chicago School he accepts the actors’ definitions of laboratories and reads
them as ways to turn Chicago into a real placeless laboratory, as when he summarizes his
discussion with: ‘the “wild, natural” city has been made in the laboratory and brought under
experimental (and maybe political) control…’ (Gieryn 2006, 16). At least at some moments in his
analysis – at others less so – he seems to assume that the rhetorical moves of the Chicago School
had the effect of really turning the city into a lab. Contrary to this interpretation, I contend that
this never happened. The Chicago School and the other sociologists who used the term lab,
never really attempted to turn their places of fieldwork into placeless spaces where
inconsequential action was possible.
Most often, if an extended notion of laboratory was used, it was used to describe any place for
knowledge production, a notion that included both placeness as well as consequential action.
Since society could be in principle everywhere, it was not clear at all in early sociology where to
look at. The term laboratory did a twofold job: first it secured that sociology was a science, by
invoking the laboratory as a term that referred to the natural sciences. Second, it allowed to frame
a particular place (mostly understood in the topographical sense) to be a legitimate object of
inquiry. Let me start with those uses of laboratory that invoked science and then move on to
those who framed a particular place as legitimate site of research.
For example in Chicago, George E. Vincent titled an article ‘a laboratory experiment in
journalism’ (Vincent 1905), but the paper simply describes a course in the history, theory and
practice of journalism without even mentioning laboratory in the text, let alone to discuss it. This
generalized notion of laboratory was often used in the context of education, where laboratory did
not invoke knowledge production, but a space where students would be trained not with books
but with real world objects, which included ‘fieldwork’ (Melvin 1925; Aldrich 1940).
Another use was to call the sociology institutes themselves laboratories. For example W.E.B. Du
Bois called the institute in Atlanta, founded in 1895 that he headed since 1897, a ‘sociological
laboratory.’ (Du Bois 1903; Wright 2002). In his article, the laboratory is not really defined, but it
becomes clear that the laboratory was not so much the institute, but the location of the
laboratory in the city as a concrete place to study African Americans and moreover, a place where
they could be studied as a category since they were living more or less segregated.1 This notion he
later clarified in his autobiography ‘Dusk of Dawn’: ‘Social scientists were ... still thinking in
terms of theory and vast and eternal laws, but I had a concrete group of living beings ... capable
of almost laboratory experiment’ (Du Bois 1978, 36).
1
A similar notion of laboratory in anthropology is the ‚Santa Fe laboratory’, established in 1930
(Stocking Jr. 1982). Also, Lévi-Strauss called his institute at the EHESS founded in 1960
‚laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale’. The research arm of the social relations department in
Harvard that brought together various social science disciplines, established in 1946 and run by
Stouffer was also called a ‚laboratory’ (Nichols 1998).
Similarly, Jacob L. Moreno wrote about ‘the participant observer of the social laboratory,
counterpart of the scientific observer in the physical or biological laboratory’ as the main role of
the sociologist in his project of ‘sociometry’ (Moreno 1937, 210). The sociological laboratory for
Moreno was society itself and the role of the sociologist, whom he called a ‘field worker’
(Moreno 1937, 218), was to animate people to participate in sociometry. This meant that they had
to observe and interact with others to produce data for the sociologist in such a way until they
became ‘participants in and observers of the problems of others as well as their own.’ (Moreno
1937, 211). For Moreno, a laboratory was thus simply a place where to conduct empirical work,
and referred neither to placelessness, nor inconsequential action.
This confusion was also possible, because the search for a laboratory was only in part a search for
a laboratory in the narrow sense defined here, but rather a search for empirical sites in general.
For example Gruenberg explicitly compared the tendency to conduct fieldwork with the
“disposition to introduce more and more laboratory work in the biological and physical
sciences.“ (Gruenberg 1923, 109). The use of the term laboratory for the field simply indicates
that this is a place where empirical research is conducted rather than armchair speculation.
The second use related to specific research sites. The term laboratory referred then to the relative
clear-cut boundaries of a specific field, though without trying to control the field. For example
Weatherly in “The West Indies as Sociological Laboratory” understood remote Islands as
laboratories because they were “isolated”, thus the “play of social forces is least disturbed by alien
elements“ and one could observe „behaviour as nearly spontaneous as is possible under modern
conditions“ (Weatherly 1923, 290). Though he does not give a clear definition of a lab, it is
obvious that he considered the West Indies to be labs not because they could be controlled, but
because „social forces“ occur as found in nature, rather than produced and disturbed in modern
cities.2
None of these laboratories allow for placelessness. As Gieryn himself writes: “It mattered that
observations were done here in Chicago and not just anywhere, because Chicago and its
constituent neighbourhoods and social patterns are at least distinctive, and possibly unique“
(Gieryn 2006, 18). Even though the Chicago-sociologists, and others who used the term
laboratory, sought to generalize and thereby de-localize their findings derived from their
particular research site, this was a rhetorical move (Gieryn 2006, 19-20), and not substantiated by
control of the supposed lab itself, the city. The rhetorical move of the Chicago School2
For a similar use of „laboratory“ see Henderson and Aginsky (1941), where the New York
University established a research post in a carefully selected northern Californian Community.
sociologists consisted in claiming that what they found out about Chicago was typical for big
cities, but they did not attempt to stabilize the claims with a lab.
Apart from simply using the term laboratory, some authors attempted at direct comparisons with
the natural sciences. Typical for these comparisons is that they do not seek to emulate the
practices of the natural sciences but parallel different kinds of practices in the natural and the
social sciences with the term laboratory.
In Chicago, Robert Park claimed that “social science has achieved something that approaches in
character a laboratory experiment. For the purpose of these experiments the city … becomes …
a device for controlling our observations of social conditions in their relation to human
behavior.” (quoted from Gieryn 2006, 15). The laboratory of Park, that only “approached” the
natural science lab “in character”, is surprisingly not a tool to control the object of research, but
the researchers themselves.
Another use related to the lab as a closed – but not controlled – space to do research. Wilber
Newstetter from Western Reserve University wrote in an article on measuring group adjustment:
“There are many laboratories for the experimental study of the common cold; there are few
laboratories for the experimental study of social behavior set up and directed from the point of
view of sociology“, hoping for a sociology whose aim would be to have an „objective basis for
the prediction and control of social behavior“ and airing his disappointment with „past
sociology“. (Newstetter 1937, 230). His laboratory, a “summer camp”, was defined by being a
closed space, not so much one in which an experimenter could control the inmates, but one
which allowed for overview. Newstetter also went on to conflate the lab and the field, when he
wrote, “The study began in 1924 and the field investigation ended in 1933.“ (Newstetter 1937,
230).
Similarly, Edwin Sutherland from the University of Chicago understood the prison as a
laboratory, where he could have easy access to prisoners, and he already understood that the
prison as laboratory was an “artificial” environment. Thus he compared the advantages of the lab
with the field: In the lab, the prisoner is „not in his ‚natural habitat’.” Which raised the criticisms
that „a criminal can no more be understood in prison than a lion can be understood in a cage“
and prisoners should be „studied ‚in the open’." (Sutherland 1931, 132). But his understanding
was based on the difference between the prison and “the open” as more or less natural “habitats”
and not as places with more or less control. In each of these cases it is apparent that the authors
do not try to turn these spaces into controlled spaces, but that they need the term laboratory to
explain something about their concept of social research for which they are missing other words.
The metaphorical use of the laboratory also backfired, and from early on, specifically in Chicago
sociology, the term laboratory was criticised too: Henderson, already in 1899 opposed the notion
because it implied „inquisitive investigators [who] may pursue methods of vivisection and torture,
in order to illustrate or test sociological theories“ (quoted in: Gross 2009, 85). Jane Addams
opposed it, because she believed that the settlements were “something much more human and
spontaneous than such a phrase [laboratory] connotes “ (quoted in: Gross 2009, 85). The word
“connote” makes clear that she understood that settlements were in fact no laboratories and the
use of the term metaphorical. Both of these criticisms indicate that the Chicago sociologists had a
clear understanding that their sociology was based on fieldwork that could not do and should not
attempt at inconsequential action. As Gross points out, Jane Adams did not use the term
laboratory but rather the term experiment. Experiment for her was precisely not the contained
inconsequential action, but exploratory tests of new social situations outside a laboratory, in the
real world (Gross 2009, 86-88).
In general, in these early days of sociology in Chicago and elsewhere, laboratory and field were
not necessarily understood to be opposing terms, and “fieldwork” was not understood as it is
today as “qualitative” and opposed to quantitative or lab work. Fieldwork was not even a strong
category; in Chicago the term ‘case study method’ was used instead. The term laboratory did not
imply an attempt to create a proper laboratory. Rather, it was a sign of a nascent discipline trying
to reflect and define its methods.
The Stabilisation of Field-Laboratory Dichotomy in Sociology
After the Second World War, when the differentiation between the social and natural sciences
became more stable, the terms lab and field became differentiated and were used in their
standard form as controlled environment vs. non-controlled environment (Sherif 1954; O’Rourke
1963). This development was probably mostly an effect of the success of philosophy of science
and its application to the methodology of social science and the actual attempts to do proper
laboratory experiments in sociology (for an overview see Bonacich and Light 1978). After the
second world war, philosophy of science increasingly turned towards social science and social
scientists themselves showed an interest in clarifying and thoroughly comparing their own
research techniques with those of other sciences, which resulted in fairly sophisticated
methodological discussions (Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg 1955; Braybrooke 1965). The
methodological texts of the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties did not create a rift between
lab and field. Rather, they were driven by the urge to refine the empirical tools of sociology and
were thus directed against theoretical synthesis in the wake of Talcott Parsons.
The methodologists in the social sciences accepted the methodology of the natural sciences and
the meaning of specific terms, such as laboratory, experiment, testing of hypothesis, causation,
induction and deduction. These discussions made the metaphorical use of laboratory impossible.
An early flavour of this was already sounded by Howard Becker in 1940: “In spite of highsounding phrases in graduate school bulletins about Harlem or rural Iowa or gangland Chicago as
‘a sociological laboratory,’ most sociologists know full well that they cannot experiment, that they
are not laboratory scientists, and that in the opinion of many competent judges they never will
be.“ (H Becker 1940, 44).3 This led to the question what a laboratory in sociology could be, if it
existed at all, (see for example Ackoff 1953, 2 ff.; Kaplan 1964, 126-170). Specifically, with the
increasing use of quantitative and statistical techniques, the laboratory as an ideal became
problematic. Control over the situation and the reduction of variables appeared unnecessary:
“The developments of methods of ‘multivariate analysis’ has removed the necessity of
manipulation and the laboratory, and it permits the scientist to go out into the world and tackle
increasingly complex problems in their natural habitat” (Ackoff 1953, 4). The laboratory became
clearly defined, but exactly this definition questioned its use for sociology: “Whether or not the
work of sociology a decade hence will take the form of laboratory experimentation, it seems clear
that few of our present techniques operate at their greatest effectiveness in that situation”
(Goode and Hatt 1952, 94).
Indeed, in the following two decades, laboratory experimentation had been applied to many
sociological problems, pioneered by Robert Bales in the 1950ies and continued by scholars like
Joseph Berger and Morris Zelditch. These studies ranged from role differentiation to the
prisoners dilemma. The sociological laboratory had ceased to be a metaphorical concept to
legitimate sociology. But exactly because the laboratory became real, it also became more
problematic: the laboratory was only partly suited for sociological work: even the most avid
proponents of laboratory experiments understood that “the variables in the laboratory seem to
bear little relation to the names the experimenter give to them” (Bonacich and Light 1978, 166).
For sociology, the very difference between the inside and outside of the real laboratory was
considered too be by too big to handle: “it is time … to leave the lab” (Bonacich and Light 1978,
167).
Conversely, “field work” started to get scrutinized as well and could no more be confused with a
laboratory (HS Becker 1958; Zelditch 1962). Becker for example wishes that “qualitative research
3
The quote is from an article by Howard P. Becker, who was a sociology professor in Wisconsin
and became ASA president, not by Howard S. Becker, who was only born in 1928.
may become more a ‚scientific’ and less an ‚artistic’ kind of endeavor“ (note that the link is
science, rather than a lab, and against „art“) (HS Becker 1958, 660). Thus, since the 1950ies, a
laboratory in sociology was strictly defined: it was neither an exemplar for those interested in
statistics nor those who became qualitative sociologists and it could not be confused with a city,
an island or a summer camp as research site anymore.
Only the thorough acceptance of philosophy of science and the emergence of real laboratories
allowed developing alternatives. Qualitative social science could not call its field a lab anymore.
The field slowly became the romanticised counterpart to the lab and quantitative data. For a brief
time, in the early 1960ies, laboratory and experiment could still be thought to be compatible with
an interest in verstehen (Schutz 1965). At that time in qualitative sociology, typical themes of the
Chicago-school, such as the role of the stranger were tested in the laboratory (Nash and Wolfe
1957). As Garfinkel (Garfinkel 1952, Garfinkel 2001) and Cicourel (Cicourel 1964) intended to
show, laboratory experiments could be used to prove the invariant foundations of social order
based on “verstehen”. For Garfinkel and Cicourel, laboratory experiments were problematic only
if they took common assumptions between experimenter and subject for granted, rather than to
use experiments to test the foundations of this reciprocal process.
However, soon Ethnomethodology and what now became “qualitative” sociology dropped this
interest in experiments and the idea of “verstehen” became narrowly identified with uncontrolled
field situations.4 In this view, the procedure of “verstehen” required a completely different
epistemology, which could not be framed with the existing tools of philosophy of natural science
based on the exemplar of the laboratory. A typical representative for this shift is Herbert Blumer,
who was trained in Chicago and started his career by positively discussing laboratory experiments
in his unpublished dissertation from 1929 “Method in Social Psychology“ (Hammersley 1989,
136-137). But later, in 1969, in his central book on symbolic interactionism, he was at pains to
define symbolic interactionism as a kind of „naturalistic investigation ... that is directed to a given
empirical world in its natural, ongoing character instead of to a simulation of such a world, or to
an abstraction from it (as in the case of laboratory experimentation)“ (Blumer 1969, 46). Indeed,
the very idea of emulating natural science was mistaken: „Symbolic interactionism is not misled
by the mythical belief that to be scientific it is necessary to shape one's study to fit a preestablished protocol of empirical inquiry, such as adopting the working procedure of advanced
physical science, “ (Blumer 1969, 48).5 Laboratory experiments were excluded from qualitative
4
For an overview of those methodological discussions see (Filstead 1970b).
5
Similarly see Filstead (1970a, 3).
sociology and were identified with the new sister discipline social psychology (Good 2000, 392). 6
The Laboratory was now the other of qualitative sociology. It was associated with useless
aspirations of sociology to become a natural science and it was taken to represent a wrong
attempt to control, what in essence could not be controlled, namely interactions.
In short, no later than in the 1960ies, the notion of laboratory in sociology had been in sync with
the standard use of the term. A laboratory was now a controlled environment. Laboratory
experiments led a shadowy existence, because qualitative sociology thought they would make
“verstehen” impossible and quantitative sociology had no use for them either.
With the distinction between lab and field firmly in place, new nuances between laboratory and
field were found too. For example in the 1960ies Donald T. Campbell developed the notion of
“quasi-experiments”, a sociological analysis of public reforms understood as a kind of experiment
with and in society (Campbell 1971). His aim was to improve policy making by scientifically
evaluating social reform programs for their efficiency rather than for their political uses.
However, Campbell very consciously calls them “quasi-experiments”, because they do not take
place in a laboratory, but in society itself, and only allow for partial control (also see Gross,
Hoffmann-Riehm, and Krohn 2005; Gross and Krohn 2005).
The Renewed Expansion of the Lab After its Definition
The current use of the term laboratory again blurs this distinction, sparked by a renewed interest
in laboratories as places of doing science. In the early 1980ies Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour,
Steve Woolgar and Michael Lynch published the first “laboratory studies” (Latour and Woolgar
1979; Lynch 1985; Knorr-Cetina 1984). They provided for the first time an empirical analysis of
what scientific laboratories do. They, and several subsequent studies, established a detailed
understanding of the features of laboratories, from which the definition in the previous chapter is
drawn. Thus, today’s extension of the “laboratory” takes place after two decades of specification
of the term.
In early sociology, STS did not exist, and the notion of laboratory was a metaphorical aid to
understand what sociology is doing. To call the city a lab, was a means to specify the status of
sociology as a science at a moment when this status contested and unclear. The renewed use of
6
Later it became possible to bring symbolic interactionism back into the laboratory, though
this remained a minority position, associated mostly with social psychology, although see the
example of the sociologist Carl Couch, who identified very much with sociology, see Couch
(1987) and Molseed (1994).
the term laboratory to designate all kinds of research takes place in a situation where the scientific
status of STS and sociology is not contested. Rather scholars trained in STS are expanding their
objects from science to other fields, such as the built environment, architecture and
infrastructure. This renewed extension of the laboratory returns to the earlier ones under the
umbrella of STS. My aim is to clarify these extensions in comparison with the earlier ones with
the very tools of STS.
I would like to look at the following recent uses of the term laboratory: 1. Lab as collaboration 2.
Empirical extension of lab space (society as laboratory/real world experiments) 3. Lab as a
generalized notion for spaces for knowledge production: the locatory. 4. Lab as a container to test
objects: the unilatory. Other than the historical uses of the term laboratory, some of the recent
uses use the term laboratory not to describe the sociologists’ own practices, but as a second order
categories to describe other sciences. However, this extension to other sciences conceptually
follows the earlier extensions of the laboratory of sociology itself.
1. The laboratory as collaboration: The local control of disciplinary norms
Probably the most unusual expansion of the laboratory comes from Paul Rabinow, Stephen
Collier and Andrew Lakoff (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2006; Rabinow 2007). They use the
term laboratory to designate their way of collaboration in anthropology7 specified as “joint
production of papers” and “concept development, collective reflection, and shared standards of
evaluation“ (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2006, 1). A laboratory for them is a way of doing
collaborative work on similar topics across different institutions. Thus their notion of a
laboratory has nothing to do with my definition or any other usual definition of a laboratory and
could rather be called a network or more prosaically, a working group.
7
As far as I can see, in anthropology the extended use of the term laboratory was and is
unusual. For example, neither the encyclopedia by Barnard and Spencer, nor the one by
Seymour-Smith defines the term field and both do not mention the laboratory in the respective
entries on “methodology” and “research methods” (Barnard and Spencer 1996, 364-367;
Seymour-Smith 1986, 245-246). One reason might be that the separation of physical and
cultural anthropology always kept the proper lab-notion of physical anthropology present that
prevented an extended use in cultural anthropology. Some authors refer to an outdated mode
of colonial anthropology that treated research subjects as in a laboratory. The one classical
text that refers to such a notion is Margaret Mead in her introduction to “Coming of Age in
Samoa”, but she uses the term laboratory to distinguish from natural science and to justify the
use of ethnography (Mead 1928, 5). Another metaphorical use of the term laboratory simply
calls the field a laboratory, as for example Herskovits, who writes under the heading “the
ethnographer’s laboratory”: “the field is the laboratory of the cultural anthropologist”, without
further aiming to explain the laboratory-like qualities of the field (Herskovits 1948, 79).
However, what is remarkable about their “laboratory” is that the authors have a background in
STS and are thus familiar with precise definitions of laboratories. They are at pains to deny that
they imitate natural science and that they do not aspire for „positivistic scientific rigor“ (Collier,
Lakoff, and Rabinow 2006, 5). They spend some energy in legitimating their differing use and
they use the term to criticize the practice of anthropology. They seek to redistribute the
connection between reputation, knowledge claims and validation with the help of their lab. For
them, a laboratory is a counterbalance to the “individual project” that „rests on a myth of sui
generis intellectual production“, exemplified by “Clifford Geertz in Princeton” (Collier, Lakoff,
and Rabinow 2006, 1; Rabinow 2007, 8). With the individual project, knowledge claims are
validated based on a model, which distributes reputation not along intersubjective criteria but
along intransparent hierarchies.
The laboratory, in their view, allows for among other things, „Experimentation as a way to put
concepts to the test“, „established agreed upon demonstrations of adequacy“, „Search for
impersonal methodological norms“, „Recognition of legitimate authority based on knowledge
rather than status“ (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2006, 4). These goals read like taken from an
introduction to the Mertonian norms of science (Merton 1973). Their laboratory compensates for
the fact that, in their view, current anthropology is not a Mertonian science, but defined by „a
crisis in thinking about what constitutes a valid claim“ and a non-scientific distribution of
reputation (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2006, 4). Their laboratory is a private, small-scale
attempt to turn back anthropology into a Mertonian science. What is remarkable is not so much
the implied sorry state of anthropology, but the idea that the problem shall be solved not by
changing the discipline but by creating a small network called laboratory. Whereas in science, the
lab is a place for controlling the subjects of research, for Collier, Lakoff and Rabinow it is a place
for controlling disciplinary norms.8 By doing so, they reverse one of the other scarce notions of
the lab in recent anthropology: Bonté and Izard write in their French dictionnaire in the entry
“méthode ethnographique” under the subheading “le terrain”: “Taking a widely used formula,
the field is the “laboratory” of the anthropologist: it is his vocation to gain field experience until
the point where the “first field” has become the experimentum crucis that decides on a career”
(Bonte and Izard 1991, 473). Whereas for Bonté and Izard the field-as-lab-as-experimentumcrucis is a public space under the control of the whole anthropological community, for Rabinow
8
Their notion of the lab is quite similar to that of the Harvard social relations lab of the
1940ies and -50ies that should bracket disciplinary norms and allow for disciplinary
convergence (Nichols 1998).
et al. the field-as-lab has become defective and is replaced by a private and thus controlled
network-as-lab.
2. „Society as Laboratory“: Real-World Experiments as De-Laboratization of Science
A second use of the term laboratory occurs in the thesis of „society as laboratory“ (Krohn and
Weyer 1988). The notion of society as laboratory describes an empirical extension of the
laboratory space to the whole of society. This observation is driven by recent developments, such
as atomic power plants, climate change or the release of genetically modified organisms that
cannot be tested within the controlled spaces of a laboratory. Any test of these technologies by
definition takes place in society itself turning it into an “experimental society” (Krohn and Weyer
1988, 349).
But the notion of laboratory does not really fit the insightful diagnosis. The difference between
society as a laboratory and the real laboratory is that the laboratory introduces a difference
between an inside and an outside that allows both “placelessness” and „inconsequential action“.
“Real-world experiments” as the authors call them, do not allow for any of these. Climate change
is located – even if on a very large scale. It cannot be generalized because it is already
everywhere– except to other planets. Climate change cannot be controlled, tested and then
released. It is always taking place in a real world. Krohn and Weyer themselves stress that these
experiments cannot be contained. As they observe, with “society as laboratory” or rather, the delaboratization of science, science begins to resemble more closely the economy, the law or
politics, that do not know a test-mode either (Krohn and Weyer 1988, 350).9 Consequently, in
later texts by the same authors, they expand the concept of real-world experiment and correctly
drop the notion of “laboratory” (Gross and Krohn 2005).
3. Specific Places as Laboratories, or: Rats without Labs: the Locatory
Another recent use of the term laboratory is similar to the earlier uses as a generic notion for
places of research. In this sense, the city or a country is a laboratory for economists, sociologists
and planners. A typical case for such a use is Bockman and Eyal (Bockman and Eyal 2002), who
look at Eastern Europe as a laboratory for economists. They do so by successfully introducing
the language of actor-network theory to explain why neo-liberalism as an economic explanation
came to be successful after 1989. In their view, Eastern Europe is a laboratory, because
9
A similar extension of a laboratory, was already present in one of the earliest sociological
texts on laboratories by Chapin who understood Utopian communities and “social legislation”
as “experiments” (Chapin 1917a, Chapin 1917b).
economists could test knowledge claims in a specific historic situation that was not available in
the West.10 Similarly, Greenhough uses the case of deCODE’s plans for a genomic database to
discuss Iceland as a laboratory for science studies scholars (Greenhough 2006). Another example
is Lapp who uses the term laboratory to describe how American social scientists in the 1950ies
and 1960ies conducted research in Puerto Rico, but without mentioning of ANT or science
studies (Lapp 1995).
However, these cases simply follow their precursors such as Newstetter, Sutherland or Weatherly
and describe relatively clearly delineated field sites that do not allow a distinction between a
controlled environment and a knowledge object.11 The cases are like rats without a lab. There are
knowledge objects to observe, but they cannot be controlled. Rather the opposite, knowledge
claims become located and tied to these places. Also, neither Eastern Europe nor Iceland, nor
Puerto Rico allow for inconsequential action. Rather the opposite, everything that happens is
consequential for all the inhabitants, which is exactly what makes these case studies so
compelling.
In the case of Greenhough and Bockman and Eyal the authors are probably misled by the
possibility to apply ANT-language (translation, black-boxing, network) to their cases. Because
ANT language has been developed with reference to laboratories, the authors follow from the
fact that it can be applied to other cases, that these cases are laboratories too. But ANT is about
to become a general sociological description language, which allows to see the world as an
assemblage of networks and translations (Latour 2005). Hence, the application of ANT does not
render automatically every place into a lab; it only renders the world according to ANT.
I propose to understand the above examples as distinct spaces of doing science and call them
locatories.12 Locatories are places where specific knowledge claims can be made, that are not
10
A precursor to seeing social transformation in Eastern Europe as natural experiment is
(Giesen and Leggewie 1991).
11
Greenhough herself is skeptical of using the term laboratory, but based on the empirical
argument that Iceland as an island is not really separated from its environment.
12
As one reviewer suggested, one could argue that the recent extension of the laboratory in the
case of the locatory is in fact a version of the sociology of external validity. This concept was
introduced to deal with the problem of extending research results from the lab to outside the lab
(see Campbell and Stanley 1966). The idea of external validity is based on an understanding of a
difference between internal and external validity. It requires to understand that there exists indeed
as distinction between the inside and the outside of the laboratory, and that therefore internal
validity has to be backed up by external validity. The expansion the laboratory would then be a
possible in other places. Locatories are thus not mere fields, where objects can be observed “in
the wild”, or according to their “natural” behaviour. Locatories tie the observation to a specific
location. This is what makes locatories so valuable. The economists in Bockman and Eyal’s story
could not build a place to test their theories. Also, they could not just go outside of their offices
and observe people. They needed a specific place with specific properties to observe what they
needed. A laboratory, wherever it would have been, and however large it would have been, would
exactly not allow finding out what they wanted to find out. They needed a locatory, where their
theories could be tested in a real world setting, where real actors would do real actions with real
consequences. Unlike a real-world experiment that is global and cannot be controlled, a locatory
has defined boundaries. These boundaries may be geographical (an island) but they also may be
defined by social definitions (a political system, an economic system etc.). Actions in locatories
are not inconsequential but consequential and typified. That is, locatories allow understanding
actions not just as actions per se, but as functions of the locatory.
4. Selective Control, or: The Unilatory as Lab Without Rats
The last extension of the laboratory is the laboratory as a container to test unique things or in a
more general sense, the laboratory as the workspace of designers. This expansion has been used
for factory planning (Miller and O’Leary 1994), the architectural office (Potthast 1998), policy
think tanks or creative incubators. A laboratory in this sense would be a space, where
professionals manipulate models, drawings, signs and texts that refer to the outside world. The
analogy to the laboratory is first and foremost that social scientists conduct a similar kind of
empirical observation in those places as in laboratories. As in laboratory studies, sociologists and
anthropologists can observe in situ how these professions manipulate their objects. This parallel
has indeed been productive, since it made the ethnographic studies of architectural laboratories
or think-tanks possible after all (the author is himself guilty of such a “laboratory study” of
consultancies).
However, neither consultancies nor architectural offices are laboratories according to my
definition. In the case of consultancies and other think tanks and creative incubators, the work is
similar to the economists of Bockman and Eyal. In the case of architectural offices the problem
is more complex. One could say that the architectural office is like a laboratory. The office
creates a distinction between an inside and outside, where the object, the building is under full
conscious attempt to deal with external validity. However, none of the authors who expands the
laboratory attempts this kind of argument.
control of the architect. The architect can preview and manipulate the size, form and structural
properties of the building.
But I would argue that this misses an important point about buildings in modernity, namely the
fact that they are built to change society, and thus act as technologies on users. But these users
cannot be brought into the architectural office and manipulated. What can be manipulated are
the physical properties of the buildings. As long as the architect’s task is restricted to the
construction of buildings, then the architectural office is indeed a lab. But as soon as the
architect’s task is understood to be about creating buildings to create specific effects in society,
then the architect’s office is no lab, since it fails to manipulate and control what it claims to do.
Such places I propose to call unilatories. They are defined by the fact that like laboratories, they
do create a difference between an inside and an outside, but the object they purport to
manipulate cannot be controlled because it is not in the laboratory. In the case of the
architectural office, this is so, because the properties of users are quite different from those of
buildings. A plan or a model can precisely represent a building, but not a user. A user can be
brought into a laboratory and he can be researched in various ways, but architects hardly try to
do so. And if they do so, they don’t do it in the same space where they draw and model. In a
architectural office as unilatory, architects manipulate drawings and models in order to change
society, but society itself remains outside. A unilatory is not simply a laboratory that fails to
control some aspects of the object. This is obviously true of every laboratory. Laboratories are
designed to ignore certain aspects of the object that is manipulated. A unilatory fails to control
exactly those aspects of the object that it purports to control. I do not claim that buildings that
result from operations in unilatories do not indeed change society. They do, as has been shown
over and over. But these changes stand in no direct relation to the operations of the unilatory,
such as the formal properties of a building do. This is why I call a unilatory the laboratory
without rats. In a unilatory the most elaborate treadmill can be set up, but the rats never fit in.
Delaboratizing the World.
In this article I have discussed the history of the uses of the term laboratory in sociology and
science studies. Based on my definition of a laboratory as a distinction between an uncontrolled
outside and a controlled inside I traced the history of the laboratization and delaboratization of
the world through sociology. The historical view has shown that an initial phase of calling any
research place a lab was followed by a delaboratization of sociology after the war. In this phase,
(qualitative) sociology defined itself as the other of the lab. The recent rise of laboratory studies
has led to a renewed laboratization of the world. However, rather than following the initial
impulse to clarify the relationship between place and science, STS has repeated the
universalization of the laboratory. I have critically discussed some elements of the laboratization
of the world and proposed two alternatives that may help to further theorize the relationship
between place and knowledge without turning the whole world into a laboratory. The first is the
locatory, an instance of rats without a lab. The locatory is a specific kind of place that allows
observing very specific objects that only exist there and are dependent of the locatory. Second, I
defined the unilatory, a lab without rats, a specific kind of laboratory that can control only one
part of its object whereas another, equally constitutive part cannot be controlled.
It may seem that this article is driven by an anti-metaphorical stance. I seem to purge sociology of
using spatial metaphors to describe research places. But my goal is far more limited and precise: I
do not object to the use of metaphors if they help to frame an object, and in early sociology, the
metaphor of the laboratory was indeed helpful to frame sociology as a legitimate science. But
metaphors are only instructive when the metaphorical use of a term is apparent. When the
metaphor is taken for the thing itself, as is often the case with the term laboratory, it tends to
obscure rather than help to think. The laboratory metaphor in recent sociology has obscured the
relationship between knowledge production and place, because it has reduced a diversity of
forms to one historical blueprint. The problem here is not that the laboratory is used in a
metaphorical way, but that the laboratory as metaphor does not suit any of the objects the
authors want to understand and rather leads to believe that these places have qualities of real
laboratories, when in fact they do not. By suggesting the terms unilatory and a locatory I propose
to reframe two of these cases and thereby add some precision to our vocabulary.
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