in which professional, political, or economic factors may have given form to those designs … the costs of technology tend to become obvious only at the moments of catastrophic failure – when we suddenly realize that, somewhere along the line, there was something lethally wrong with a technology that we were used to taking for granted. (Bijker & Law, 1992, pp. 1, 2)
The use of controversies as research instruments has a long pedigree, dating back to ethnomethodology. Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments are perhaps the best-known ancestors. In his experiments, Garfinkel would ask students to purposely contravene some basic social norms in order to “sustain bewilderment, consternation, and confusion; to produce the socially structured affects of anxiety, shame, guilt, and indignation; and to produce disorganized interaction that should tell us something about how the structures of everyday activities are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained” (1967, p. 38). Here is an example:
The victim waved his hand cheerily.
(S) How are you?
(E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my …?
(S} (Red in the face and suddenly out of control) Look! I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are. (p. 44)
These field experiments make social norms and background expectations visible through the disruption of commonplace situations. The method was later adopted by social psychology through the work of Stanley Milgram who developed a more systematic protocol to break and thus reveal the unwritten rules of queuing or riding the subway (Milgram & Sabini, 1978). In a similar way, controversies offer a sort of breaching experiment for technoscientific phenomena.
In a classic example of how the breaching power of controversy can enable the study of science and technology, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) analyzed the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Shapin and Schaffer wanted to know why scientists conduct experiments, which is difficult to answer now that the experimental method has become the standard by which natural scientists readily swear. To overcome this self-evidence, Shapin and Schaffer displaced their inquiry to a time when experimental science was still controversial and its protagonists had to defend it explicitly against its critics.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, Boyle and Hobbes were the protagonists in a clash between the burgeoning British scientific revolution and the more established continental natural philosophy. Boyle was one of the co-founders of the Society for Experimental Methods, soon to become the Royal Society, and was famous for his experiments with air pumps (which eventually led him to formulate Boyle’s law, stating that the volume of a gas varies inversely to its pressure). For many of his contemporary natural philosophers, proving natural laws by way of experiment was unthinkable. Among them, Hobbes was a particularly vocal critic. He argued that Boyle’s experiments were not valid because they were carried out in an artificial setting (i.e., the void created by the air pump) and thus impossible to reproduce in real life. On top of that, the air pump was an unreliable device, which made it conveniently possible for Boyle to blame an air leakage when experiments failed. Besides, the high cost of building an air pump meant that the reproduction of experiments was limited to a small elite of wealthy “gentleman scientists.” This did not disturb Boyle who only recognized members of the Royal Society and his so-called “Invisible College” as a legitimate audience for his experiments. To make matters worse, given that direct witnessing of the experiments was not always practical, Boyle accepted that it could be replaced by meticulous descriptions of the research protocol and transcriptions of the results. For Hobbes, and other seventeenth-century natural philosophers, the idea that truth could in this way “travel in literary form” was simply absurd. In their view, reliability hinged on first-hand observation.
This controversy between Boyle and Hobbes, then, becomes an instrument for Shapin and Schaffer to reveal how scientific knowledge depends on established conventions. The acceptance of Boyle’s findings hinged on the material technology of the laboratory (represented by the air-pump), the social technology of the peer community (represented by the Royal Society), and the discursive technology of the scientific literature (represented by Boyle’s meticulous style of reporting).
Another example of the methodological power of controversy is provided by the so-called “Climategate” affair (Maibach et al., 2012). In November 2009, a group of hackers leaked thousands of emails and documents stolen from the servers of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (a key actor in the global warming debate). By quoting a few carefully selected exchanges, climate skeptics used the leaked emails to convey the impression that climate change research was nothing more than a scientific conspiracy. Exploding a few days before the Climate Summit in Copenhagen where the international community was expected to agree on a successor of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions, the Climategate scandal offered a convenient excuse for those wanting to stall the negotiations (Leiserowitz et al., 2012). While Climategate is a disturbing example of the use of a made-up scandal to influence the media and the diplomatic agenda, it is also an example of how every cloud has a silver lining. The leak gave social scientists access to an extraordinarily rich dataset that would otherwise likely have required a lifetime of archival work (Ryghaug & Skjølsvold, 2010).
Mapping as a method for design and innovation
Besides facilitating the study of science and technology in society, controversies can also be helpful when developing new sociotechnical arrangements. Climategate, for example, was not only an opportunity to observe the making of climate science, but also an occasion to strengthen the procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scandal and other controversies on errors found in the 4th Assessment Report led to a reform of the IPCC procedures and an improvement in their quality and transparency (Beck, 2013). Something similar happens in innovation projects where objections and resistance from stakeholders can, if taken properly into account, produce more robust solutions. For those who design and develop new products and services, controversy can be an occasion to understand users and foreground issues that would otherwise be hard to anticipate.
Think of controversies as a form of crash tests. How do we know that we can bet our life on the brakes, safety belts, and airbags in our cars? How do we know that we can rely on car manufacturers and trust in their safety systems? In the automobile industry, such questions are answered by subjecting prototypes to impact trials. Only after having passed these crash tests are vehicles allowed into commercial production. Likewise, stress tests are common for computer hardware and software; furniture is subjected to load tests; electric appliances undergo accelerated life tests; and toys are submitted to destructive forces like those that kids can unleash on them with their teeth. In all these cases, products earn their “right to exist” by overcoming a series of trials. Controversies are, in this sense, sociotechnical crash tests. How do we know that pesticides will not break our alliance with pollinating insects or that our email provider will protect our privacy? How do we know that medical techniques are compatible with ethical principles or that the development program of our city will not destroy biodiversity? These are the kinds of questions we test in sociotechnical controversies.
A famous example of how new technologies develop in an interplay with their “relevant social groups” is provided by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker (1987) in their analysis of the controversies surrounding the introduction of the modern bicycle. Rather than a brilliant and original solution deliberately engineered for the needs of its intended users, Pinch and Bijker describe a long period of “interpretative flexibility” in which different bicycle designs competed against each other, followed by a phase of “closure and stabilization” in which the symmetrical-wheels design eventually became the unique standard. The shift from one phase to the other required the intervention of a multitude of actors: from long women’s skirts (which could not cope easily with bicycle wheels), over cycling races (which allowed comparing the speed of different designs) and safety concerns, to the
