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Editorial Introduction: Unpacking Intervention in Science and TechnologyStudiesTeun Zuiderent-Jerak a; Casper Bruun Jensen baUniversity Medical Centre Rotterdam, The Netherlands bCopenhagen Business School, Denmark

Online Publication Date: 01 September 2007

To cite this ArticleZuiderent-Jerak, Teun and Jensen, Casper Bruun(2007)'Editorial Introduction: Unpacking 'Intervention' in Scienceand Technology Studies',Science as Culture,16:3,227 235

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Editorial Introduction: UnpackingIntervention in Science andTechnology Studies

TEUN ZUIDERENT-JERAK & CASPER BRUUN JENSEN

University Medical Centre Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

When Elizabeth Costello, the main character in a novel by J. M. Coetzee (2003), is stand-

ing in front of the Gate, she is asked by the gatekeeper to write up a statement about what

she believes in. In her first attempt, she claims a dispensation from the condition to enter,

by composing a statement that says:

I am a writer, a trader in fictions. I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs

would stand in my way. I change beliefs as I change my habitation or my clothes,

according to my needs. On these groundsprofessional, vocationalI requestexemption from a rule of which I now hear for the first time, namely that every peti-

tioner at the gate should hold to one or more beliefs.

This request is not granted. The gatekeeper drops the sheet of paper on the floor and hands

her a new sheet saying: What you believe.

Her second attempt is slightly more successful. It passes the gatekeeper and she gets to

appear in front of a team of judges for whom she has to defend her declaration of belief.

She claims:

I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one ofmany secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for

me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and test

them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right. Before I can pass on I am

required to state my beliefs. I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is

inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting

for the call. In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself

of resistances.

Science as Culture

Vol. 16, No. 3, 227235, September 2007

Correspondence Address:Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Department of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus MC

University Medical Center Rotterdam, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Email:[email protected]

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/07/0302279 # 2007 Process PressDOI: 10.1080/09505430701568552


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When questioned by one of the judges who states: Without beliefs we are not human, she

claims that she is not bereft of all belief, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They

are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of

duty. This response is still insufficient to grant her entrance through the gateperhaps the

reference to hearts and senses makes it insufficiently disembodiedso she has to make athird attempt.

This time she claims to believe in what is there, regardless of whether she believes in

it or not. She believes in the frogs that appeared in her childhood when the rains came

back to the Australian land she grew up in. She believes in the river that the frogs

live in. I believe in what does not bother to believe in me. When confronted by a

judge with this contradiction with her second declaration, she claims that her present

she is a different one from the one she was then. When later she states that I am

not confused, the judges respond: Yes, you are not confused. But who is it who

is not confused? before first starting to giggle and then losing all dignity and bursting

out in a roaring laughter.

When Costello meets the gatekeeper again she tells him that it did not go all that well.

She asks if she stands any chance to make it through the gate. He states: We all stand a

chance. But as a writer, she insists, what kind of a chance do I stand as a writer, with the

specific problems of a writer, the specific fidelities? The gatekeeper says its not up to him

to decide on this. But when she asks if they meet many people like her, in her situation, he

finally looks up from his work and says: All the time. We see people like you all the time.

For many social researchers, the problem that Elizabeth Costello runs into may sound fam-

iliar. The first statement illustrates the dangerously relativist (but arguably phantom

(Smith, 2005)) position of the uninhibited constructivist, making up worlds as he or

she likes. In turn, the second position claims for Costello the role of neutral observer, a

secretary of events, or tape-recorder of nature. This is a position that crystallizes andcaricatures the aspirations of traditional sociology and anthropology, where duty to

reality overrides all personal concerns. Finally, the third position exemplifies, on the

one hand, a return to subjectivity, grounded in personal experience, not dissimilar to

certain strands of feminist theory. However, on the other hand, this stance is significantly

tempered by pragmatism, according to which such experience can be maintained as a

ground for belief, just as long as it does not bother.

Social Scientists at the Gate

In science and technology studies (STS) as elsewhere, continuous appeals are appearing,urging research to get real (Balet al., 2004) by which is meant to demonstrate usefulness,

not just academically, but also in practical environments such as policy and business.

Costellos personae allow us to get some purchase on what this might and might not

entail in terms of research strategies. As a first estimation, one might interpret her

initial attempt as decidedly unreal, whereas the second, real perhaps, nevertheless

remains irrelevant since fidelity to dictating facts remains her sole duty. The third role

best exemplifies the stance of ethnographic STS as it is grounded in experience and

does not shy away from believing. Yet it is not without problems since the rather crass

pragmatism embraced by this persona means that what is believed at any particular

moment depends on what does not bother; which is to say that it depends on whatappeals within the specific setting in which the ethnographer is located.

228 T. Zuiderent-Jerak & C. B. Jensen


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Our aim, however, is not to sort these types into a hierarchy so as to adjudicate which

stance is most or least adequate from an STS perspective. Instead, we want to make therather different observation that each stance exemplifies a mode of responding (discur-

sively and practically) to the concrete activities and challenges that must be dealt with

in practice. This allows us to recognize that several modes coexist or alternate in any

given research project.

Just as in Costellos case, the identity of the researcher often appears shifting and mul-

tiple or even fragmented and schizophrenic. But it always remains situated. And just as in

Costellos case, the gatekeeper might well respond to the perplexed researcher that he sees

people like this all the time. The reason for this similarity is not that the researcher finds

him or herself in the exactly the samesituation as Costello the writer. Quite to the contrary,

the similarity is that the researcher, just as the writer, operates under fluctuating circum-stances, whose varyingspecificitiesare what matters most when it comes to making differ-

ences. Recognizing that we are thus the same only in always being specifically located

(that is, in being different) seems to us to be a crucial starting point for exploring the poten-

tials of what could be called an ethics of specificity for research.

The aim of this special issue is to explore questions pertaining to normativity and inter-

vention in social research. These matters are often discussed in what we consider rather

bland either-or debates: either critical or descriptive, either theoretical or practical, either

political or scientific. Rather than empirically unpacking what form social research interven-

tions may take, pleas for intervention often claim to repair descriptive social science.

As Patrick Hamlett puts it, in an article that neatly maintains the descriptivenormativedivide: It may be time for constructivist analyses to move beyond the descriptive

Source: Idea for cartoon adapted from # Kneebone and Wadsworth (1998).

Intervention in Science and Technology Studies 229


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examination of the social dynamics of technology to a more proactive approach on the larger

issues (2003, p. 114). The reasons for this, he claims, are that if:

the apparent gap between the [constructivists] programs descriptive richness and its

normative irrelevance [be bridged] [. . .

] intentional interventions [. . .

] would allowthe investigator greater insights into the operations of the mechanisms of technologi-

cal change, as well as serve as a vehicle through which the researcher may help

change the direction of such change into channels more compatible with normative

standards. This, however, would require that social constructivists make choices

among competing normative perspectives. (Hamlett, 2003, p. 134)

Such claims place the social researcher in front of the Gate: get real about the larger

issues, state your beliefs, choose among competing normative perspectives. Fortunately,

other, less dichotomous understandings of these relationships may be viable or even

necessary tools for social researchers. These would help to articulate the landscapes in

which researchers work as constitutively mixed, heterogeneous and hybrid without

merely celebrating this multiplicity. Thus, a series of publications and workshops on

empirical approaches to the question of intervention argue that the descriptive

normative divide leaves many important issues about doing research unaddressed (see

e.g. Markussen, 1996; Downey and Dumit, 1997; Woolgar et al., 2004; Lynch and

Cole, 2005; Woolgar et al., 2005; Francisco and Sabanovic, 2006). These analyses also

emphasize that such issues have serious consequences in terms of both conceptualization

of and engagement in ethnographically based research.

To tease out what such relationships might look like we have organized two work-

shops which brought together researchers who, in various ways, interacted with differ-

ent practices while also reflecting on their abilities for doing so and the challenges theyfaced (Jensen and Zuiderent, 2005; Zuiderent-Jerak and Jensen, 2006). The workshops

focused on the particular practices of what we called action-oriented STS. We urged

participants to explore what it entails to do action-oriented research, in a way that did

not see the endeavour as antithetical to descriptive research but rather, took seriously

the set of arrangements surrounding the research projects. Action-oriented projects

were generally requested and funded by actors in the field to be researched, who

were thereby hoping for a contribution to solve various problems. We were however

also interested in exploring the different forms interventions can take in both action-

oriented research projects and in research carried out under other conditions. We

thereby hoped to further problematize distinctions between description and action andinstead focus on potentials made visible if one unpacks the notion of interventions,

which may be intended or unexpected but which are always consequential for both the

practices studied and the STS researcher. Unpacking what it means to intervene in

such diverse and tricky ways enabled us to come up with new answers to requests to

get real. It is for such reasons that this special issue has as a main focus the explora-

tion of what it means to intervene as an STS researcher, rather than simply how to

do action-oriented research. With this agenda in mind we encouraged contributors to

discuss issues such as:

.

the practical interplay of fidelities and practice and its tensions;. the roles which are attributed to and taken up by STS researchers in the field;



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. the interplay between political, epistemic and rhetorical authorities in action-oriented

projects;

. the transformations or translations (gains and losses) of STS knowledge and capacities

into different practices;

. the normativities that are enacted through these processes;

. the conceptual, theoretical and practical consequences for STS as a field of such

reorientations.

Two workshops and many discussions later we offer the following set of themes as crucial

for considering the potentials, implications and consequences of any kind of intervention-

ist social research.

Unpacking Intervention

Finding Frictions/Finding TimeIt became clear that intervention and transformation are only enabled to the extent that

attachments are enabled between the intervening researcher and the actors inside a

given practice. In other words it proved important to find frictions within the practices,

which STS researchers may attempt to act with (Kember, 2003). But if exploring these

frictions is a precondition for any successful engagement, then drawing connections to the

histories of similar interventions could be an important resource for an interventionist STS

researcher. This creates the complication that building connections and sorting attach-

ments takes timetime that is not always within the scope of a specific intervention or

action-oriented project.

Distance and Multiplicity

The problem of lacking time to do what it is nevertheless crucial to do (finding frictions) led to

another recurring theme, which could be referred to as the multiplicity of interventions. Inter-

ventions are multiple in two senses: first, actors simply do many different things and their

activities depend on how they are situated in relation to a given practice. Thus the

manager of a hospital, for obvious reasons, may have a totally different agenda from the

ethnographer conducting a study there. Secondly, however, multiplicity resides in the fact

that it is in practice often impossible to control the proliferating effects of ones interventions,

for which reason high hopes and good intentions are never enough to ensure benign out-comes. Indeed, and this is most troublesome for normative programmes in social research,

this means that it is impossible to unequivocally define what an intervention really, finally, is.

Mutual Betrayal and Artful Contamination

But if no general definition of what it means to intervene is readily available and if, further,

nobody is in ultimate control of the transformational process involved in intervening, then

the question of intervention is necessarily changed as well. Rather than considering the

topic in terms of one-way causation (the researcher intervenes in the field or, alternatively,

the role of the researcher is entirely determined by forces in the field), we are then enteringa hybrid space, in which many agents constantly negotiate and influence each other, in



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order to achieve multiple conflicting goals. A picture thus emerges of intervention as

mutual betrayal, or, more positively, as a process of artful contamination whereby

actors spread their agendas, ideas and aspirations.

Messy Epistemic Authorities

Lest this sounds unduly optimistic about the researchers interventionist capacities, we

have to also consider the relationship between authority and intervention, another persist-

ent theme in the discussions of this issue. Thus, different kinds of interventions require

different kinds of authority, which the researcher may sometimes be free to select, but

that are more often attributed to him or her. Such attributed authorities acquire agency,

in the sense that they become influential for the kinds of interventions that are expected

from a particular researcher. Different authorities therefore have different accountabilities.

A rhetorical authority that is acquired or adopted in a particular research project will

have an effect on opportunities for other research strategiesfor example on those that

focus on elucidating the others that are created when the change of practice establishes

new organizational orders. Through such processes others may be selectively forgotten

when they no longer are needed for maintaining the epistemic authority of the researcher

or may even become something of a hindrance for the interventions one has been

authorized to conduct. In order not to lose a sense of power in the field (not as a grand

ideological or structural category, but as emerging and constituted in action) it is thus

crucial always to ask questions about ones interventionist strategy such as: Which

partial connections with the field do my approach, discourse and activities strengthen?

Which partial disconnections do they establish? And what kinds of normativities are

enacted through these?

Ethics of Specificity

The overall response to the question of an interventionist STS agenda is that intervention is

itself a risky, complex and partly uncontrollable process. Taking the radical indeterminacy

of the actor (including with respect to the question of whether the actor is human, technical

or other) seriously, it seems increasingly important to unpack the ways in which ontologi-

cal politics are enacted in social research practice, whether they explicitly attempt to inter-

vene or not. Perhaps interventionist or action-oriented research suggests that we must bedealing with research carried out under a certain set of contract-based arrangements. Yet,

even in such cases, intervention is a problematic term for analysing particular research

activities unless given much further specificity. If one result came out of this special issue

we would therefore hope it to be that one can no longer get away with claiming success for

ones interventions and transformational activities unless careful qualification is given for

the criteria of success, and relative gains and losses.

To designate this requirement we use the term ethics of specificity. It points to our hopes

for enhancing sensitivity to the ways in which research strategies and practices interact and

mutate in the field, and enabling researchers to take seriously the theoretical, practical and

political consequences of such ongoing transformations. In various ways, each of thefollowing papers instantiates this requirement.



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About the Papers

In his contribution, Jensen considers the question of social science utility and normativity

with a performative approach. This approach breaks down a number of classical dualisms,

including between the normative and descriptive and the theoretical and practical, and

allow us to see such terms as retrospective markers attached to certain projects and activi-

ties. In turn, this problematizes the idea that any theory or method is inherently more

useful than any other, and points in the direction of empirical studies of how the useful

is performed or enacted. Jensen analyses this process in terms of how research projects

sort attachments with their funding bodies, actors in the field of investigation and aca-

demics. Illustrating this idea with an example from an action-oriented social science

study in a hospital in Canada, Jensen argues that, rather than taking for granted the under-

standing of utility promoted by other actors, social science might help to elucidate the mul-

tiplicity of interventions at stake in any research project. He thereby argues against notions

of intervention that operate on the assumption that research is capable of impacting on

practice in useful and beneficial ways if only it cares to try. His analysis of the ways inwhich attachments are sorted opens up some alternatives to understandings of social

science interventions based on ideas of knowledge translations, which require that the

complexities and ambiguities of technology use are turned into simple recommendations

or recipes.

The question of how different forms of analysis relate to policy agendas and fields of

study raises the issue of how STS can explore relations that blur the distance between

the object and the researcher. Bal and Mastboom take up this issue by asking

whether it is possible to become part of the practices studied while still doing STS. Inves-

tigating their role in the formative evaluation of an ICT application that is supposed to

create integrated care between general practitioners and hospitals, they consider in whichways their contributions to this project were related to being from STS and they describe

how they were able to create corridors or vehicles between healthcare practices and

social science. Bal and Mastboom argue that through their travels within the project,

they were able to reframe it, for example by bringing in actors that had been excluded

based on criteria relating to more static notions of information transfer. At the same

time they tried to stay out of trouble by refusing to be qualified as authorities on cost

benefit analyses of highly controversial issues. By drawing upon the different interests

in the project as a resource for articulating its multiplicity, Bal and Mastboom argue

that they were able to become members of this practice while still remaining critical of

parts of it. They also argue for the importance of creating new essentialisms to

support the development of a situated normative agenda for STS.

Based on a field study of the implementation of an electronic medication module in a

Danish hospital ward, Markussen and Olesen considers how STS-inspired ethnographies

facilitate the development of a certain kind of rhetorical authority. Rhetorical authority is

taken as something that the researcher should aspire to, so as to prevent the results of STS

from drowning out in predominant and sometimes overwhelmingly authoritative discourse

on technological progress. At the same time, however, such authority must be accepted

with caution from a perspectiveANT or cyborgianwhich refuses the notion of unequi-

vocal technological success criteria. To clarify how this could work Markussen and Olesen

relate the implementation of the medication module to the diffusion and translation model

of power, developed by Bruno Latour. Rejecting the diffusion model, they also take issue



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with its implication that practices in which technologies fail to work as imagined must be

in need of repair. In contrast, the authors propose a criterion of banality to measure the

relative success of sociotechnical change processes.

If Markussen and Olesens endpoint was an identification of banality as a criterion that

can be used to counter the repair metaphor of much technological discourse, Mesmansstarting point was to find resources of resilience helping to ensure patient safety in a neo-

natal intensive care unit. More precisely, Mesman aimed to uncover hidden competen-

cies, which practitioners make use of to retain a safe environment. By reflecting on her

own interactions during fieldwork, she discusses how this collaborative research involved

ongoing methodological and moral considerations, in order to determine how to interact

with the ward, given the varying interests of her and her informants, the fickle relation

between staying outside and moving inside practice, and the multiplicity of roles

that the researcher needs to negotiate in this process. Mesman shows, on the one hand,

how the many contingencies of research in action prevents general normative position-

taking from being a very useful approach to engaging practice and how, on the other

hand, collaborative opportunities may emerge in unexpected locations, thereby turning

presumed constraints into corridors to interventional opportunities.

Like earlier contributions, Vikkelss paper argues against the dualism between

description and intervention. According to Vikkels both stances bring along a set of con-

cerns that could be referred to as the fear of contamination by practice, on the one hand,

and the fear of irrelevance, on the other. Based on analysis of a situation in which she was

invited to move from descriptive studies of healthcare transformation towards proactive

actor-network theory by an actor in the field, Vikkels argues that acceptance of the easy

dichotomization of activity and passivity blinds the researcher to the multifarious norma-

tive dimensions of any practical research project. This means that the symmetrical

description provided by the researcher inevitably constitutes a kind of intervention, allow-ing research to link up with some concerns, agendas and issues rather than others. This

raises the question of what characterizes a good description and Vikkels concludes

her paper with a consideration of this issue.

Finally, Zuiderent-Jerak reviews the ways in which social scientists can act with stan-

dardization practices in order to refigure both these practices and STS debates on the nor-

mativity of research. A brief history of the increased distance between the development

and implementation of clinical guidelines indicates how implementation problems

emerge as a consequence of this separation. The development of integrated care path-

wayswhich aimed to overcome this distancenevertheless became equally separated

into phases of design and use. Through an action-oriented research project of developingcare pathways for an hematology/oncology outpatient clinic, Zuiderent-Jerak aims toarticulate a processual approach to standardization that sees pathways as an outcome

of a dynamic change practice, rather than a desired design to be implemented. He

claims that this approach of preventing implementation is fruitful not merely for articu-

lating the processual take on pathwaying, but also to get entangled in the normative com-

plexity that resides within practices. This complexity is crucial for arguing against claims

that STS suffers from a normative deficit. Instead, Zuiderent-Jerak proposes a normative

surfeit model where STS researchers have to deal with the overflow of normativities.

The special issue aims to explore the specific consequences of various modes of inter-

vention that are enacted by different research practices and arrangements. By presentingthese cases, we hope to contribute to the creation of a grammar that allows for both



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nuanced reflection on and exciting experiments with what it means to intervene as an

STS researcher.

Acknowledgements

We would gratefully like to acknowledge the participants of the two workshops on

unpacking intervention in Amsterdam and Aarhus. We also wish to thank the 26 anon-

ymous referees for their careful and thoughtful feedback to the papers. We would further-

more like to thank (1) the Grant Scheme for International Workshops and Expert Meetings

of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO); (2) WTMCThe

Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture;

and (3) the Healthcare Governance section of the Department of Health Policy and

Management of the Erasmus MC for their generous contribution to the workshop in

Amsterdam, and the Department of Information and Media Studies of Aarhus University

for their generous contribution to the Aarhus workshop. Finally, we would like to thank the

editor Les Levidow for his support.

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