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The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package

January 2008

Publisher: The MIT Press

Authors:

University of California, San Francisco

Extensive review of the origin and history of social worlds theory, including the perspective that theory and methods operate as a package (not methods in service to theory). A comprehensive list of the vocabulary of social worlds and references to each study that introduced each term. Also a brief introduction to Clarke's situational analysis, which treats the situation as the unit of analysis rather than imagining any sort of context.

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In this chapter, we present the social worlds framework, a form of analysis used in a

wide array of STS studies. The social worlds framework focuses on meaning-making

amongst groups of actors—collectivities of various sorts—and on collective action—

people “doing things together” (Becker, 1986) and working with shared objects,

which in science and technology often include highly specialized tools and

technologies (Clarke & Fujimura, 1992; Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Social worlds are

deﬁned as “universes of discourse,” shared discursive spaces that are profoundly rela-

tional (Strauss, 1978). Over time, social worlds typically segment into multiple worlds,

intersect with other worlds with which they share substantive/topical interests and

commitments, and merge. If and when the number of social worlds becomes large

and crisscrossed with conﬂicts, different sorts of careers, viewpoints, funding sources,

and so on, the whole is analyzed as an arena. An arena, then, is composed of multi-

ple worlds organized ecologically around issues of mutual concern and commitment

to action.

This framework thus assumes multiple collective actors—social worlds—in all kinds

of negotiations and conﬂicts, committed to usually on-going participation in broad

substantive arenas. The framework is relentlessly ecological, seeking to understand the

nature of relations and action across the arrays of people and things in the arena, rep-

resentations (narrative, visual, historical, rhetorical), processes of work (including

cooperation without consensus, career paths, and routines/anomalies), and many

sorts of interwoven discourses. The social worlds framework is particularly attentive

to situatedness and contingency, history and ﬂuidity, and commitment and change.

We begin with a brief account of the development of the concept of social worlds

in the American sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism. We then demon-

strate how the social worlds framework is a “theory/method package,” drawing upon

an understanding of perception itself as theory-driven. Next we turn to some of the

key concepts generated through using the social worlds framework. Especially in

studies of scientiﬁc work practices, these include boundary objects, segments, doabil-

ity, work objects, bandwagons, implicated actors/actants, and cooperation without

consensus. The social worlds framework has also been especially useful in studies of

controversy and of disciplinary emergence, and we review this work. Recently, the

5 The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package

Adele E. Clarke and Susan Leigh Star

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social worlds framework has become the conceptual infrastructure of situational analy-

sis (Clarke, 2005), a new extension of the grounded theory method, with which the

social worlds framework has long been associated. In conclusion, we offer a brief

overview of the more methodological aspects of the theory/methods package.

SOCIAL WORLDS IN THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST TRADITION

The social worlds framework has its historical roots in Chicago School of Sociology,

originally based at the University of Chicago. Confusingly, the “Chicago School” left

Chicago in the late 1950s. In diaspora, however, we its descendents still refer to it

as the Chicago School of Sociology (not to be confused with the Chicago School of

Economics). Initially, the Chicago School practiced an empirical, urban sociology,

studying different neighborhoods and worksites of the city. The insights of

pragmatist philosophers George Herbert Mead and John Dewey were folded into

these small regional studies by drawing attention to meaning-making, gestures, and

identities. Groups, within which individuals were situated, were regarded as “social

wholes” (Thomas, 1914), making meaning together and acting on the basis of those

meanings. The meanings of phenomena thus lie in their embeddedness in relation-

ships—in universes of discourse (Mead, [1938]1972:518) which Strauss (1978) later

called social worlds.

Early sociological ecologies of these “social wholes” focused on various kinds of

communities (e.g., ethnic enclaves, elite neighborhoods, impoverished slums), dis-

tinctive locales (e.g., taxi dancehalls, the stockyards), and signal events of varying

temporal duration (e.g., strikes). The sociological task was to “to make the group the

focal center and to build up from its discoveries in concrete situations, a knowledge

of the whole . . .” (Eubank in Meltzer et al., 1975:42). One could begin from a place

or a problem. Baszanger and Dodier (1997: 16, emphasis added) have asserted:

Compared with the anthropological tradition, the originality of the ﬁrst works in the Chicago

tradition was that they did not necessarily integrate the data collected around a collective whole

in terms of a common culture, but in terms of territory or geographic space. The problem with

which these sociologists were concerned was based on human ecology: interactions of human

groups with the natural environment and interactions of human groups in a given geographic

milieu . . . The main point here was to make an inventory of a space by studying the different com-

munities and activities of which it is composed, that is, which encounter and confront each

other in that space.

These “inventories of space” often took the form of maps (see especially Zorbaugh,

1929). The communities, organizations, and kinds of sites and collectivities repre-

sented on such maps were to be explicitly viewed in relation to the sitings or situations

of one another and within their larger contexts, featuring relationality. “The power of the

ecological model underlying the traditional Chicago approach lies in the ability to

focus now on the niche and now on the ecosystem which deﬁned it” (Dingwall, 1999:

217; see also Star, 1995a). This analytic power is retained today.

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In the generation following Mead, just after World War II, several analysts combined

some of the traditional focus on (1) meanings/discourse as related to ethnicity and neigh-

borhood, and (2) the search for identity in the forms of work, practice, and memory. This

synthesis resulted in a sociology that was both material and symbolic, interactive, proces-

sual, and structural. James Carey (2002: 202) claims that Anselm Strauss, one of the prac-

titioners from this period, had invented “a sociology of structuration before Anthony

Giddens invented the word,” grasping structure as emergent in ways that later informed

his social worlds theory (see also Reynolds & Herman-Kinney, 2003).

During the 1950s and 1960s, researchers in this tradition continued studies of “social

wholes” in new ways, shifting to studies of work, occupations, and professions, and

moving from local to national and international groups. Geographic boundaries were

no longer regarded as necessarily salient, and attention shifted to shared discourses as

both making and marking boundaries. Perhaps most signiﬁcantly, researchers increas-

ingly attended to the relationships of groups to other “social wholes,” the interactions

of collective actors and discourses. In today’s methodological vernacular, many such

studies would be termed “multi-sited.”

At this time, several Chicago-school sociologists initiated the development of

explicit social worlds theory—the high-modern version of studies of “social wholes”

mentioned above. Social worlds (e.g., a recreation group, an occupation, a theoretical

tradition) generate shared perspectives that then form the basis for collective action

while individual and collective identities are constituted through commitments to and

participation in social worlds and arenas (Shibutani, 1955; Strauss, 1959). Commit-

ment is both predisposition to act and a part of identity construction (Becker, 1960,

1967). Strauss (1978, 1982, 1993) and Becker (1982) deﬁned social worlds as groups

with shared commitments to certain activities, sharing resources of many kinds to

achieve their goals and building shared ideologies about how to go about their busi-

ness. Social worlds are universes of discourse (Mead, [1938]1972: 518), principal afﬁlia-

tive mechanisms through which people organize social life.

Until the 1980s, most symbolic interactionist research focused on social worlds cen-

tered around social problems, art, medicine, occupations, and professions (e.g., Becker,

1963, 1982; Bucher & Strauss, 1961; Bucher, 1962; Bucher & Stelling, 1977; Wiener,

1981). Since the early 1980s, as more interactionists became involved in STS, the social

worlds framework has been increasingly used in interactionist research in STS. Initial

work on the material bases of social worlds in life science (Clarke, 1987; Clarke &

Fujimura, 1992) led to many fruitful avenues of inquiry about the nature of tools,

nonhuman components of social worlds (Latour, 1987; Suchman, 1987), and the inter-

action between humans and nonhumans. This in turn encouraged the exploration of

infrastructure as a deeply rooted aspect of social worlds analysis. Contemporarily,

infrastructures (virtual, ofﬂine, textual, and technical) are imbricated with the unique

nature of each social world and, especially as scale becomes important, with arenas

(Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Neumann & Star 1996; Star, 1999). Infrastructures can be

understood, in a sense, as frozen discourses that form avenues between social worlds

and into arenas and larger structures.

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Social worlds studies have encompassed examinations of the doing of science; the

organization of scientiﬁc work; and the making, distribution, and use of technology

as forms of work. We review many of these below but ﬁrst address an important

epistemological issue.

THE SOCIAL WORLDS/ARENAS FRAMEWORK AS A THEORY/METHODS PACKAGE

In social science, from William James at the turn of the twentieth century to the

present, considerable and convincing work has been done that asserts the theory-

driven and socially based nature of perception. Particularly in STS, we no longer strug-

gle with the image of some sort of tabula rasa as the beginning moment of research,

to be gradually ﬁlled in as we encounter the “real” world. Rather, we understand that

we begin with some combination of previous scholarship, funding opportunities,

materials, mentorship, theoretical traditions and their assumptions, as well as a kind

of deep inertia at the level of research infrastructure (Bowker, 1994; Star & Ruhleder,

1996). Such traditions and assumptions serve as root metaphors applicable to the sit-

uation of inquiry—from social worlds to actor-network theory (e.g., Law & Hassard,

1999) to ethnomethodology (e.g., Lynch, 1985). Blumer ([1969]1993: 24–25, emphases

added) discussed such metaphors as follows:

The Possession and Use of a Prior Picture or Scheme of the Empirical World Under Study . . . [T]his is

an unavoidable prerequisite for any study of the empirical world. One can see the empirical world

only through some scheme or image of it. The entire act of scientiﬁc study is oriented and shaped

by the underlying picture of the empirical world that is used. This picture sets the selection and

formulation of problems, the determination of what are data, the means to be used in getting

data, the kinds of relations sought between data, and the forms in which propositions are cast.

The social worlds framework is one such “prior picture or scheme.”

The social worlds framework relies strongly upon George Herbert Mead’s

([1927]1964, [1934]1962) key concepts of perspective and commitment—that all

actors, including social worlds as collective actors, have their own perspectives, sites of

work and commitments to action vis-à-vis the substantive situation/arena. As social

worlds intersect or grow to become arenas, their joint courses of commitment and

(inter)action are articulated through discourses. Discourses here, then, mean these

assemblages of language, motive, and meaning, moving toward mutually understood

modus vivendi—ways of (inter)acting. Perspectives, as deﬁned by Mead to include com-

mitments that stem from work and material contingencies, are discourses in collective,

material action. This concept of “discourse” and its particular history are distinct from

concepts of discourse analysis stemming from European phenomenology and critical

theory (e.g., Jaworski & Coupland, 1999; Weiss & Wodak, 2003; Lynch & Woolgar,

1990).

The particular power of the social worlds framework is that precisely because social

worlds are “universes of discourse” the framework explicitly goes beyond “the usual

sociological suspects”—conventional, highly bounded framings of collective actors

such as organizations, institutions, and even social movements. These “suspects” are

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displaced in the social worlds framework by more open, ﬂuidly bounded, yet discourse-

based forms of collective action. Analysis must take into account more problemati-

cally bounded and contingent discursive as well as organizational arrangements

(Clarke, 1991). Thus, the broader situation is opened up for emergent and ongoing

analysis (Clarke, 2005).

Researchers using this approach in STS have worked from the assumption that the

social worlds framework constitutes a theory/methods package itself rooted in grounded

theory/symbolic interactionism. Such packages1include a set of epistemological and

ontological assumptions, along with concrete practices through which social scien-

tists go about their work, including relating to/with one another and with the various

nonhuman entities involved in the situation. This concept of theory-methods package

focuses on the integral—and ultimately nonfungible—aspects of ontology and episte-

mology. The concept of theory/methods package assumes that ontology and episte-

mology are both co-constitutive (make each other up) and manifest in actual practices.

Star (1989a) demonstrated the materiality and consequentiality of such

theory/methods packages in brain research. Fujimura (1987, 1988, 1992, 1996) pushed

on the modes through which theory/methods packages can travel—by being widely

accepted as part of a “bandwagon” effect. Such packages often travel well in science

because they perform well in situations at hand, such as creating “doable problems”

for research. Bowker and Star (1999) elucidate how, through classiﬁcation and stan-

dardization processes, computer and information science can dramatically facilitate

such travel.

For most of us using the social worlds framework, the methods “end” of the

theory/methods package has been grounded theory, an approach to analyzing largely

qualitative ethnographic (observational and interview) materials. Developed by

Strauss and Glaser (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1978; Strauss, 1987; Strauss &

Corbin, 1990), it is an abductive approach in which the analyst tacks back and forth

between the empirical materials and conceptual means of expressing them. Today

grounded theory is one of the major approaches used in qualitative analysis globally

(Clarke, 2006a,b).

Over the past twenty years, a more Straussian version of grounded theory that is

more constructivist, interactionist, and reﬂexive has been generated (e.g., Strauss,

1987; Charmaz, 2000). Strauss was also generating his social worlds framework at the

same time. Many of us in STS routinely drew upon both of these (see also Clarke &

Star, 1998), and they have recently been synthesized by Clarke (2005).

The very idea of theory/methods packages assumes that “Method, then, is not the

servant of theory: method actually grounds theory” (Jenks, 1995: 12). This means, of

course, that theory/methods packages are both objects of interactionist science studies

research and that the social worlds framework itself is a theory/methods package.

SENSITIZING CONCEPTS IN THE SOCIAL WORLDS TOOLBOX

Over the years, a toolbox of useful concepts with which to think about the relational

ecologies of social worlds, arenas, and their discourses has been generated. In our

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framework we treat them as what Herbert Blumer ([1969]1993: 147–148) called “sen-

sitizing concepts” (emphases added):

[T]he concepts of our discipline are fundamentally sensitizing instruments. Hence, I call them

“sensitizing concepts” and put them in contrast with deﬁnitive concepts ...A deﬁnitive concept

refers precisely to what is common to a class of objects, and by the aid of a clear deﬁnition in

terms of attributes or ﬁxed bench marks ...A sensitizing concept lacks such speciﬁcation . . .

Instead, it gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical

instances. Whereas deﬁnitive concepts provide prescriptions of what to see, sensitizing concepts

merely suggest directions along which to look.

Sensitizing concepts are thus tools for doing further analysis using this theory-

methods toolkit. They are not intended as ends in themselves, but as means of

analytical entrée and provisional theorizing.2The following are the key concepts devel-

oped to date in social worlds theory:

The Social Worlds/Arenas Framework Conceptual Toolbox for Science Studies3

Universes of discourse Entrepreneurs

Situations Mavericks

Identities Segments/subworlds/reform movements

Commitments Shared ideologies

Bandwagons Primary activities

Intersections Segmentations

Particular sites Technology (ies)

Implicated actors and actants Boundary objects

Work objects Boundary infrastructures

Conventions

We next elucidate each of the concepts listed above, illustrating them with examples

from STS research. In his seminal article on social worlds and arenas, Strauss argued

(1978: 122) that each social world has at least one primary activity, particular sites,

and a technology (inherited or innovative means of carrying out the social world’s

activities) and that once under way, more formal organizations typically evolve to

further one aspect or another of the world’s activities.4People typically participate in

a number of social worlds simultaneously, and such participation usually remains

highly ﬂuid. Entrepreneurs, deeply committed and active individuals (Becker, 1963),

cluster around the core of the world and mobilize those around them.

Activities within all social worlds and arenas include establishing and maintaining

perceptible boundaries between worlds and gaining social legitimation for the world

itself. Indeed, the very history of the social world is commonly constructed or recon-

structed in discursive processes (Strauss, 1982). Of course, individual actors compose

social worlds, but in arenas they commonly act as representatives of their social worlds,

performing their collective identities (Klapp, 1972) as well as generating their careers

(Wiener, 1991). For example, in the fetal surgery operating and recovery rooms, the

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surgeons, neonatologists, and obstetricians have often distinct and sometimes com-

peting agendas of concern as they may see themselves as having different work

objects—primary patients (Casper, 1994, 1998a,b)—at the same time that they are

negotiating career trajectories involving others in those very rooms.

There can also be implicated actors in a social world and/or arena, actors silenced or

only discursively present—constructed by others for their own purposes (Clarke &

Montini, 1993; Clarke, 2005: 46–8). There are at least two kinds of implicated actors.

First are those who are physically present but are generally silenced/ignored/made

invisible by those in power in the social world or arena (Christensen & Casper, 2000;

Star & Strauss, 1999). Second are those implicated actors not physically present in a

given social world but solely discursively constructed and discursively present; they

are conceived, represented, and perhaps targeted by the work of arena participants.

Much of postcolonial literature focuses precisely on this matter. Neither kind of impli-

cated actor is actively involved in the actual negotiations of self-representation in the

social world or arena, nor are their thoughts or opinions or identities explored or

sought out by other actors through any openly empirical mode of inquiry (such as

asking them questions).

Within information technology, computer developers have been notorious for their

stereotyping and disregard of the needs of computer users, classic implicated actors.

Many even called these people “lusers” (Bishop et al., 2000). Currently, this trend is

somewhat offset by the use of ethnographers and other social scientists in usability

laboratories of major corporations for their consumer products. However, at the more

custom level of technically state-of-the-art devices, more elitist practices still prevail

These include “just throw it over the wall” (and let users deal with it as best they can)

and the assumption in computer modeling that “I am the World” (and no one else

needs to be taken into account) (Forsythe, 2001; for studies of users and their roles,

see also Oudshoorn & Pinch, chapter 22 in this volume).

There can, of course, also be implicated actants—implicated nonhuman actors in sit-

uations of concern.5Like implicated humans, implicated actants can be physically

and/or discursively present in the situation of inquiry. That is, human actors (indi-

vidually and/or collectively as social worlds) routinely discursively construct nonhu-

man actants from those human actors’ own perspectives. The analytical question here

is who is discursively constructing what, how, and why?

Every complex social world characteristically has segments, subdivisions or sub-

worlds, shifting as patterns of commitment alter, reorganize, and realign. Bucher

(Bucher & Strauss 1961; Bucher 1962, 1988) named such ﬂuidity and change within

social worlds by extending social movements analysis to frame these as reform move-

ments of various kinds undertaken by segments or subworlds within professions, dis-

ciplines, or other work organizations. Bucher called these “professions in process.”

Drawing on Bucher in her study of cardiovascular epidemiology, Shim (2002, 2005)

found two major segments: mainstream and social epidemiologists. The latter consti-

tute a reform segment or movement, today informing research approaches in new

areas of study including health disparities and population health.

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The concept of staged intersections—one-shot or short-term events where multiple

social worlds in a speciﬁc arena come together—is Garrety’s (1998) particular concep-

tual contribution to social worlds theory. The key feature of staged intersections is that

despite the fact that this may be a one-time-only meeting for representatives of those

worlds, the events can be highly consequential for the future of all the social worlds

involved, for that arena—and beyond.

Fujimura (1988, 1996), in her study of the molecularization of biology, called suc-

cessful versions of such reform processes “bandwagons” when they occur on a larger

scale, mobilizing the commitments of many laboratories and related organizations.

This mobilization placed the package of oncogene theory (on the molecular genetic

origins of cancer) and recombinant DNA and other molecular biotechnological

methods at the heart of that social world. This theory/methods package was highly trans-

portable, marketed as a means of constructing highly doable problems in multiple

research centers; well aligned with funding, organizational, material, and other con-

straints upon research; and a means for attacking long-standing problems in many

biological disciplines. Perhaps counterintuitively, Fujimura found no grand marshal

orchestrating the bandwagon but rather a cascading series of decentralized choices,

changes, exchanges, and commitments, vividly demonstrating how widely distributed

a social world can be (see also Star, 1997; Strübing, 1998). The difference between

a bandwagon and an arena is that a bandwagon is more narrowly focused, in a

“fad-like” way, on a single package. An arena is larger, encompassing debates about

packages and worlds involved over a wide range of interests, boundary objects (and

potentially boundary infrastructures), and temporalities (see also Wiener, 2000).

Fujimura (1987) also introduced the useful concept of doable problems in scientiﬁc

research. Doable problems require successful alignment across several scales of work

organization. These include (1) the experiment as a set of tasks; (2) the laboratory as

a bundle of experiments and other administrative and professional tasks; and (3) the

wider scientiﬁc social world as the work of laboratories, colleagues, sponsors, regula-

tors and other players all focused on the same family of problems. Doability is achieved

by articulating alignment to meet the demands and constraints imposed at all three

scales simultaneously: a problem must provide doable experiments, which are feasi-

ble within the parameters of immediate constraints and opportunities in a given lab-

oratory, and be viewed as worthwhile and supportable work within the larger scientiﬁc

world.

In many modern arenas, reform movements have centered around processes of

homogenization, standardization, and formal classiﬁcations—things that would orga-

nize and articulate the work of the social worlds in that arena in parallel ways (Star,

1989a, 1995c). Bowker and Star (1999) analyzed how the application of computer and

information science programs in nursing has standardized that work, displacing some

areas of discretion with strict assessments of accountability. Clarke and Casper (1996;

Casper & Clarke, 1998) studied Pap smear classiﬁcation systems as attempts to impose

standardization in a notoriously ambiguous clinical domain across the heterogeneous

worlds involved in that arena. Timmermans, Berg, and Bowker (Berg, 1997;

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Timmermans, 1999; Timmermans & Berg, 1997, 2003; Berg & Timmermans, 2000; and

Berg & Bowker, 1997) discussed the application of computer-based techniques to

medical practices and how these produce “universalities” in medical work. And Tim-

mermans (2006) followed on with a study of coroners’ classiﬁcations of suspicious

deaths. Lampland and Star (under review) have focused on comparative standardiza-

tions across people, techniques, laws, and concepts in their edited volume Formaliz-

ing Practices. And Karnik (1998) explored consequences of classiﬁcation in the media.

Understanding boundaries has long been important to science studies (Gieryn,

1995) and has become increasingly important in the social sciences (Lamont &

Molnar, 2002). In social worlds theory, Star and Griesemer (1989) developed the

concept of boundary objects for things that exist at junctures where varied social worlds

meet in an arena of mutual concern. Boundary objects can be treaties among coun-

tries, software programs for users in different settings, even concepts themselves. Here

the basic social process of translation allows boundary objects to be (re)constructed

to meet the speciﬁc needs or demands placed on it by the different worlds involved

(Star, 1989b). Boundary objects are often very important to many or most of the social

worlds involved and hence can be sites of intense controversy and competition for

the power to deﬁne them. The distinctive translations used within different worlds for

their own purposes also enable boundary objects to facilitate cooperation without

consensus.

For example, in Star and Griesemer’s (1989) study of a regional zoology museum

founded at the turn of the twentieth century, the museum’s specimens were bound-

ary objects. There were collections of multiple specimens of each species and sub-

species which, for the zoologists to ﬁnd them useful, had to be very carefully tagged

as to date and where collected and carefully preserved and taxidermied. Aerial tem-

perature, humidity, rainfall, and precise habitat information on the geographic origins

of specimens all were important. The mammal and bird specimens were usually killed,

gathered, and sent to the museum by amateur collectors and “mercenaries” (paid col-

lectors) of varied backgrounds. Also involved were university administrators, a pow-

erful patron who was herself an amateur collector, curators, research scientists, clerical

staff, members of scientiﬁc clubs, and taxidermists. All had particular concerns about

the specimens that needed to be addressed and mutually articulated for the museum’s

collections to “work” well for all involved.

Thus, the study of boundary objects can be an important pathway into complicated

situations, allowing the analyst to study the different participants through their dis-

tinctive relations with and discourses about the speciﬁc boundary object in question.

This can help frame the broader situation of inquiry as well. The concept of bound-

ary objects has also been extended. For example, Henderson (1999) included visual

representations as “conscription devices,” weaving this understanding into the analy-

sis of work, power, and the visual practices of engineers. Her work lends powerful,

visual-based sensibility to the boundary objects idea.

Bowker and Star (1999: 313–314) recently raised the conceptual ante with the

concept of “boundary infrastructures” as larger infrastructures of classiﬁcation deeply

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institutionalized, “sunk into the built environment, . . . objects that cross larger levels

of scale than boundary objects.” These are often digitalized information systems that

link large-scale organizations with multiple purposes and/or constituencies. “Bound-

ary infrastructures by and large do the work that is required to keep things moving

along ...[T]hey deal with regimes and networks of boundary objects (and not of

unitary, well-deﬁned objects).” Boundary infrastructures by no means imply univer-

sal consensus, at whatever level they may be analyzed. For any individual, perspec-

tive, or locale, they can as well produce a misﬁt with infrastructure, called torque by

Bowker and Star (1999). (The metaphor is like the twisting of steel just a bit out of

alignment.) However, the torque may not be visible or perceptible to most, often until

a social movement makes it so, as with disabled people and the accessibility of

structures.

Most recently, Bowker’s (2005) Memory Practices in the Sciences examined the history

of information infrastructures from paper to silicon. Using geology, cybernetics, and

biodiversity as case studies, Bowker analyzed the work that their information infra-

structures have done in mediating the trafﬁc between natural and social worlds. Some

facets of that trafﬁcking are memorialized—preserved in the infrastructure as memory

device—while others are reconﬁgured or erased. Bowker vividly shows how scientiﬁc

infrastructures are projecting our modes of organization onto nature at increasingly

broader scales via emergent, globally used boundary infrastructures.

In sum, then, the conceptual toolbox of social worlds theory permits analyses of a

full array of collective human social entities and their actions, discourses, and related

nonhuman elements in the situation of concern. The key analytical power of social

worlds/arenas theory, so rooted in Chicago social ecologies, is that one can take advan-

tage of the elasticity of the concepts to analyze at multiple levels of complexity. The

utility of social worlds theory for STS was recognized not only by interactionists but

also by others. For example, Becker’s (1982) Art Worlds was taught in STS courses in

the 1980s.6

Over the years, the social worlds/arenas framework has been compared with actor-

network theory (e.g., Law & Hassard, 1999; Neyland, 2006), known as ANT, a major

analytical frame in STS. While we lack space here for an extended comparison, we do

want to state that we view these two approaches as kindred in many ways (especially

compared with earlier approaches to the study of science) and yet also as offering quite

different affordances and accomplishing different analytical ends. The social worlds

framework allows for the drag of history; the cumulative consequences of commit-

ment and action over time are deeply etched. For example, Karin Garrety (1997, 1998)

compared ANT and social worlds approaches in an examination of the cholesterol,

dietary fat, and heart disease controversy which has extended over four decades. She

found the social worlds framework allowed analysis of changes within and across

worlds over time while the scientiﬁc “facts” also remained unstable and contested.

In contrast, ANT is excellent at grasping emergent connections that may or may not

gel into social worlds in arenas. Networks (that are not worlds) of many kinds may

also endure and fully deserve analysis. ANT is most robust at this. Because of its

common lead-scientist focus on the perspective of the most powerful, ANT has been

122 Adele E. Clarke and Susan Leigh Star

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characterized as a more “executive” vision. ANT concepts of “interessement” and

“obligatory points of passage” are often framed as one-way streets. In contrast, social

worlds theory is insistently pluralist, seeking to analyze all the perspectives in the sit-

uation. But these approaches can also vary in the hands of different researchers and

when the approaches are used for particular purposes.

In comparing Latourian ANT with social worlds/arenas, it has been said that the

centralized nature of power in ANT is more French, whereas for social worlds, the plu-

ralism of perspective is vividly inﬂected American. Bowker and Latour (1987) made a

somewhat similar argument in their paper comparing French and Anglo-American

science and technology studies. They argued that the rationality/power axis so natural

to French technocracy (and explored in Foucault inter alia) is precisely that which

must be proven in Anglo-American work, since, in the Anglo American context, it is

usually “assumed” that there is no relationship between the two.7

Social Worlds Studies of Controversies and Disciplines

Key sociological differences emerge when researchers focus on studying the work

activities, organization, and discourses of social worlds in science, technology, and/or

(bio)medicine rather than studying individuals. Placing work—action—in the fore-

ground facilitates the analysis of social worlds qua worlds and the elucidation of the

key human and nonhuman elements. For Strauss (1978), Becker (1982), and some

others working with the social worlds framework (e.g., Star, Fujimura, Baszanger,

Clarke, Garrety, Casper, Shim, Shostak, and others), the social worlds and arenas them-

selves became the units of analysis in two main genres of studies of collective dis-

course and action—scientiﬁc controversies and disciplines (including boundary

objects and infrastructures). Here we often see the phenomenon identiﬁed by inter-

actionists as cooperation without consensus writ large.

Clarke and Montini (1993) provide an accessible example of controversy studies by

focusing on the multiple social worlds involved in the controversy surrounding use

of the abortifacient RU486, also known as “the French abortion pill” in the U.S. The

paper analytically places RU486 in the center and then moves through the speciﬁc

perspectives on it of each of the major social worlds involved in the broader abor-

tion/reproduction arena: reproductive and other scientists, birth control/population

control organizations, pharmaceutical companies, medical groups, anti-abortion

groups, pro-choice groups, women’s health movement groups, politicians, Congress,

the FDA, and last but not least, women users/consumers of RU486. Here Clarke initi-

ated the concept of implicated actors discussed earlier. As is often the case, these were

the users/consumers. Clarke and Montini showed that social worlds themselves are

not at all monolithic but commonly contain extensive differences of perspective that

may be more or less contentious. Moreover, contra Mol, they demonstrated how, given

these different perspectives, RU486 is vividly different things to different social worlds

in the arena.8

In their study of the controversy about whether hormone disruption is caused by

exposure to synthetic chemicals in the environment, Christensen and Casper (2000)

used a social worlds/arenas analytic to map the discourse in key documents (see also

The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package 123

HTN05 5/8/07 09:51 AM Page 123

Albrechtsen & Jacob, 1998). They focused on two sets of implicated actors particularly

vulnerable to exposures but excluded from the possibility of scientiﬁc claims-making:

farm workers and fetuses. Their focus allowed them to analyze hierarchies of knowl-

edges and to develop policy implications of the possible future inclusion of hereto-

fore silenced but clearly implicated actors.

A number of social worlds/arenas studies take up disciplinary and specialty emer-

gence and competition. One of the earliest was Star’s (1989a) examination of the work

of late nineteenth century British neurophysiologists that investigated the contest in

brain research between “localizationists” who sought to map speciﬁc regions and func-

tions and “diffusionists” who argued for an interactive, ﬂexible, and resilient brain

model. The scientists who supported localizationist theories of brain function built a

successful research program (read as social world here) through several strategies: by

gaining control of relevant journals, hospital practices, teaching posts, and other

means of knowledge production and distribution; by screening out those who held

opposing points of view from print and employment; by linking a successful clinical

program with both basic research and a theoretical model; and by uniting against

common enemies with powerful scientists from other ﬁelds. Star examined the pro-

duction of robust scientiﬁc knowledge through concrete practices and collective

rhetorical strategies.

Clarke (1998) studied the emergence and coalescence of the American reproductive

sciences across the twentieth century as an intersectional discipline dwelling in three

professional domains: biology, medicine, and agriculture. She situates the emergence

of this scientiﬁc social world within the larger sociocultural reproductive arena that

included other key worlds including birth control, population control, and eugenics

movements and strong philanthropic sponsors. Reproductive scientists coped strate-

gically with the illegitimacy of this sexuality-laden and therefore suspect research in

their negotiations with various audiences. Clarke (2000) further detailed how it was

only maverick reproductive scientists who actually worked on contraceptive develop-

ment and did so only outside university settings, largely in private research institutes

supported by major philanthropists and/or pharmaceutical companies. The exclusion

of women as patients and users/consumers from participation at design stages has con-

stituted millions of women as implicated rather than agentic actors in the contracep-

tive arena for almost a century. This has contributed to the ongoing spread of sexually

transmitted diseases, including AIDS. Such problematics of agency and choice are com-

monly linked to gender and race in STS.

Sara Shostak (2003, 2005) applied social worlds/arenas theory in an historical soci-

ological analysis of the disciplinary emergence of environmental genetics as an inter-

sectional project. She explored the changing relationships of the social worlds and

segments of pharmacogenetics, molecular epidemiology, genetic epidemiology, eco-

genetics, and toxicology from 1950 to 2000. Her analysis centers on the reconﬁgura-

tion of these worlds and their relationships to each other in scientiﬁc and public

health/policy arenas that are increasingly shaped by desires of environmental health

risk assessment and “regulatory science” practitioners for reliable scientiﬁc informa-

124 Adele E. Clarke and Susan Leigh Star

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tion about gene-environment interaction. Shostak further explored the construction

and consequences of new technologies (e.g., molecular biomarkers and toxicoge-

nomics) within these worlds and their appropriation and transformation by other

social worlds, including activist movements, especially in local struggles about the

health effects of environmental exposures.9

A number of studies of disciplines and specialties using the social worlds framework

emphasized a key interactionist assumption that cooperation can proceed without con-

sensus, that individuals and collectivities can “set their differences aside,” however

temporarily and contingently, in the interests of individual or shared goals. For

example, Baszanger (1998) examined the emergence of organized pain medicine as

produced through the intersection of segments of multiple specialties in an interna-

tional arena. Demonstrating the capacity for ongoing disunity within a functioning

specialty (cooperation without consensus), Baszanger offered ethnographic case

studies of two paradigmatically different pain clinics in France: one emphasizing anal-

gesia and the other focusing on patient self-management through self-surveillance and

particular self-disciplining practices. The segmental scientiﬁc history and theory of

pain medicine were thus inscribed in clinical practices.10

The emergence of fetal surgery, a more rareﬁed specialty, was studied by Casper

(1998a,b). In these still largely experimental practices, clinicians partially remove a

fetus from a woman’s uterus, operate for a variety of structural problems, and if it sur-

vives, replace it for continued gestation. Fetal surgery has been controversial since its

inception in 1960s New Zealand and Puerto Rico using sheep and chimpanzees as

animal models. Like Baszanger and Star, Casper provided detailed histories of both the

laboratory science and clinical practices. Like Clarke, she found that links to other

social worlds, speciﬁcally anti-abortion movements, were characteristic of and impor-

tant to key actors in the social world of this emergent specialty. Building on Mead’s

concept of social objects, Casper (see also 1994, 1998b) developed the concept of work

objects to describe and analyze the tangible and symbolic objects around and with

which social actors work. She analyzed the relations (sometimes cooperative, some-

times vituperative, rarely if ever based on consensus) among the different practition-

ers involved in fetal surgery who struggle over who is the patient—mother or

fetus—and who should have jurisdiction over which patient in the surgical situation

and beyond.

In the ﬁeld of information technology, changes in engineering design and manu-

facturing teams and the consequences these may have for prototypes as boundary

objects were the focus of a project by Subrahmanian and colleagues (2003). Changes

in the teams, they found, disrupted the modus vivendi that the various groups had

established for cooperation (without consensus) and (re)opened debates about bound-

ary objects per se. Gal and colleagues (2004) followed on with a fascinating study of

AEC, the architecture, engineering and construction industry, focusing on how chang-

ing information technologies, which are themselves the boundary objects operating

between the architectural, engineering and construction worlds, produce changes not

only in the relationships among these worlds but also in the identities of those worlds.

The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package 125

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That is, boundary objects are used not only as translation devices but also as resources

for the formation and expression of professional identities. Using the example of the

introduction of three-dimensional modeling technologies into building design by

architect Frank Gehry, the technology that afforded the possibility of using materials

in innovative ways for which he is now famous, Gal and colleagues argued that

changes in one world may cascade to other worlds through shared boundary objects

(see also Star, 1993, 1995b; Carlile, 2002; Walenstein, 2003). Cooperation without con-

sensus was very much the order of the day.

Another recent social worlds study found both cooperation and consensus prob-

lematic. Tuunainen (2005) examined “disciplinary worlds colliding” in Finland when

a university agronomy department focused on plant production research was

pressured by the government to incorporate new modes of doing science (including

molecular biology, plant physiology, horticulture, and agroecology) and to establish

relations with industry. Tuunainen found the disunity of plant production research

readily observable as the scientists did not create “new hybrid worlds of different dis-

ciplines” (2005: 224) but instead retained their commitments both to their disciplines

of origin and to their historical organizational niches in the university.

In her study of the making of meteorology, Sundberg (2005) focuses on intersec-

tions where modeling practice meets experimentation. New and necessary compo-

nents of simulation models became boundary objects shaping relations between the

disciplinary segments of experimentalists and modelers. In the same vein, Halfon’s

(2006) analysis of the regime change from “population control” to “women’s empow-

erment” enacted as the Cairo consensus foregrounds the scientization of both popu-

lation policy and social movement worlds through the institutionalization of shared

technical language and practices. Making and talking about demographic surveys—

using the science as shared work object—offered “neutral” sites in and through which

the requisite serious negotiations could and did ﬂourish. He reveals the too often invis-

ible work of making change in a complex world.

Last, Strübing (1998) has written on cooperation without consensus in a study of

computer scientists and symbolic interactionist sociologists collaborating over a period

of years, an intersection that has never been fully stabilized. A segment of the com-

puting world focused on Distributed Artiﬁcial Intelligence (DAI) was interested in

modeling and supporting spatially and temporally distributed work and decision prac-

tices, often in applied settings. The “distributed” in DAI means modeling problem-

solving across space and time, conducted by many entities that in some senses had

to cooperate. For example, a typical problem would be how to get computers at several

locations, with different kinds of data, to return the answer to a problem, using each

of their local data sets. This problem both reﬂected and bridged to interactionist con-

cerns with translation issues, complex intersections, and the division of labor in large

scientiﬁc projects. Strübing concluded that the sustained collaboration involved not

just “the migration of metaphors” but also the mutual creation and maintenance of

organizational structures for shared work—what Star (1991a) might call “invisible

infrastructures.”

126 Adele E. Clarke and Susan Leigh Star

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The concepts of boundary objects, boundary infrastructures, and conscription

devices are now canonically useful, central to understanding the intersections of social

worlds in social worlds/arenas theory in STS and beyond. Discipline-focused studies

utilizing these concepts have examined library science (Albrechtsen & Jacob, 1998),

genetics, geography, and artiﬁcial intelligence. Fujimura and Fortun (1996; Fujimura,

1999, 2000) have studied the construction of DNA sequence databases in molecular

biology as internationally utilized boundary infrastructures. Such databases pose

fascinating challenges because they must be both constructed across multiple social

worlds and serve the needs of multiple worlds.

In geography, Harvey and Chrisman (1998) examined boundary objects in the social

construction of geographical information system (GIS) technology. GIS, a major inno-

vation, requires complex relationships between technology and people because it is

used not only as a tool but also as a means of connecting different social groups in

the construction of new localized social arrangements. Harvey and Chrisman view

boundary objects as much like geographic boundaries, separating different social

groups yet at the same time delineating important points of reference between them,

and stabilizing relationships through the negotiation of ﬂexible and dynamic coher-

ences. Such negotiations are fundamental to the construction of GIS technology,

as Harvey and Chrisman illustrate in a study of the use of GIS data standards in the

deﬁnition of wetlands.

In public health, Frost and colleagues (2002) used the boundary objects framework

in a study of a public-private partnership project. The project brought together Big

Pharma (Merck) and an international health organization (the Task Force for Child

Survival and Development) to organize the donation by Merck of a drug for the treat-

ment of river blindness endemic in 35 countries. Frost and colleagues asked how such

divergent organizations could cooperate. They argued that the different meanings of

key boundary objects held by the participating groups allowed them both to collab-

orate without having to come to consensus and to maintain their sharply different

organizational missions. The main beneﬁt was that the project itself as boundary

object provided legitimacy to all participants and to the partnership per se. The Mec-

tizan Donation Program has become a model for similar partnerships.

In sum, social worlds theory and especially the concept of boundary objects have

traveled widely and been taken up since the 1980s by researchers from an array of dis-

ciplines that contribute to STS.

A NEW SOCIAL WORLDS THEORY/METHODS PACKAGE: SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

[M]ethodology embraces the entire scientiﬁc quest and not merely some selected portion or

aspect of that quest. (Blumer, [1969]1993: 24)

As noted earlier, the methods end of the social worlds theory/methods package has

heretofore largely been held down by Straussian versions of the grounded theory

method of data analysis (Charmaz, 2000; Clarke, 2006a; Star, 1998), including

The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package 127

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feminist versions (Clarke, 2006b). Toward the end of his career, Strauss worked assid-

uously on framing and articulating ways to do grounded theory analysis that included

specifying structural conditions—literally making them visible in the analysis—along

with the analysis of forms of action that traditionally centers grounded theory. To this

end, Strauss (Strauss & Corbin, 1990:163) produced what he called the conditional

matrix to more fully capture the speciﬁc conditions under which the action occurs.

Clarke (2003; 2005) developed a sustained critique of this matrix. To accomplish

similar goals she instead took Strauss’s social worlds framework and used it as theo-

retical infrastructure for a new extension of grounded theory. Fusing it with C. Wright

Mills’s (1940), Donna Haraway’s (1991), and others’ conceptions of situated action,

and with analytic concepts of discourse from Foucault and visual cultural studies, she

forged an approach called “situational analysis.”

In situational analysis, the conditions of the situation are in the situation. There is no

such thing as “context.” The conditional elements of the situation need to be speci-

ﬁed in the analysis of the situation itself as they are constitutive of it, not merely sur-

rounding it or framing it or contributing to it. They are it. Ultimately, what structures

and conditions any situation is an empirical question—or set of analytic questions.

Situational analysis then involves the researcher in the making of three kinds of maps

to respond to those empirical questions analytically:

1. Situational maps that lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive and other

elements in the research situation of inquiry and provoke analysis of relations among

them

2. Social worlds/arenas maps that lay out the collective actors, key nonhuman elements,

and the arena (s) of commitment and discourse within which they are engaged in

ongoing negotiations—mesolevel interpretations of the situation

3. Positional maps that lay out the major positions taken, and not taken, in the data

vis-à-vis particular axes of difference, concern, and controversy around issues in dis-

courses in the situation of inquiry.

All three kinds of maps are intended as analytic exercises, fresh ways into social science

data. They are especially well suited to designing and conducting contemporary

science and technology studies ranging from solely interview-based research to multi-

sited ethnographic projects. Doing situational maps can be especially useful for

ongoing reﬂexive research design and implementation across the life of the project.

They allow researchers to track all of the elements in the situation and to analyze their

relationality. All the maps can, of course, be done for different historical moments,

allowing comparisons.

Through mapping the data, the analyst constructs the situation of inquiry empiri-

cally. The situation per se becomes the ultimate unit of analysis, and understanding its

elements and their relations is the primary goal. By extending grounded theory to the

study of discourses, situational analysis takes it around the postmodern turn. Histor-

ical, visual, and narrative discourses may each and all be included in research designs

128 Adele E. Clarke and Susan Leigh Star

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and in the three kinds of analytic maps. Drawing deeply on Foucault, situational analy-

sis understands discourses as elements in the situation of inquiry. Discursive and

ethnographic/interview data can be analyzed together or comparatively. The posi-

tional maps elucidate positions taken in discourses and innovatively allow researchers

to specify positions not taken, allowing discursive silences to speak (Clarke, in prep.).

These innovations may be central to some of the next generation of interactionist

STS studies. For example, Jennifer Fosket (in prep.) used these mapping strategies to

analyze the situatedness of knowledge production in a large-scale, multi-sited clinical

trial of chemoprevention drugs. The trial qua arena involved multiple and quite het-

erogeneous social worlds: pharmaceutical companies, social movements, scientiﬁc spe-

cialties, and the FDA. The trial needed to manage not only millions of human and

nonhuman objects but also credibility and legitimacy across diverse settings and in

the face of conﬂicting demands. Mapping the arena allowed Fosket to specify the

nature of relations among worlds and relations with key elements in the situation,

such as tissue samples. Situational analysis is thus one example of building on the

tradition of social worlds/arenas as a theory/methods package with grounded theory

to build a novel mode of analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

Since the 1980s, the social worlds framework has become mainstream in STS (Clarke

& Star, 2003). Of particular note for us is the link to earlier interactionist studies of

work that began from the premise that science is “just another kind of work,” not

special and different, and that it is about not only ideas but also materialities (see

Mukerji, 1989). The social worlds framework thus seeks to examine all the human and

nonhuman actors and elements contained in a situation from the perspectives of each.

It seeks to analyze the various kinds of work involved in creating and utilizing

sciences, technologies and medicines, elucidating multiple levels of group meaning-

making and material involvements, commitments, and practices.

In sum, the social worlds framework as a theory/methods package enhances ana-

lytic capacities to conduct incisive studies of differences of perspective, of highly

complex situations of action and position, and of the heterogeneous discourses

increasingly characteristic of contemporary technosciences. The concepts of bound-

ary objects and boundary infrastructures offer analytic entrée into sites of intersection

of social worlds and to the negotiations and other work occurring there. The concepts

of implicated actors and actants can be particularly useful in the explicit analysis of

power. Such analyses are both complicated and enhanced by the fact that there are

generally multiple discursive constructions of both the human and nonhuman

actors circulating in any given situation. Situational analysis offers methodo-

logical means of grasping such multiplicities. The social worlds framework

as a theory/methods package can thus be useful in pragmatic empirical science,

technology, and medicine projects.

The Social Worlds Framework: A Theory/Methods Package 129

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Notes

We are most grateful to Olga Amsterdamska, Mike Lynch, Ed Hackett, Judy Wajcman, and the ambi-

tious anonymous reviewers for their patience and exceptionally thoughtful and helpful comments. We

would also like to thank Geof Bowker, Sampsa Hyysalo, and Allan Regenstreif for generous comments

and support.

1. We use the term package to indicate and emphasize the advantages of using the elements of the

social worlds framework together with symbolic interactionist-inﬂected grounded theory. They “ﬁt”

one another in terms of both ontology and epistemology. See Star (1989a; 1991a,b; 1999) and Clarke

(1991, 2005:2–5, 2006a). We do not mean that one can opt for two items from column A and two from

column B to tailor a package, nor do we mean that one element automatically “comes with” the other

as a prefabricated package. Using a “package” takes all the work involved in learning the practices and

how to articulate them across time and circumstance.

2. Contra Glaser and Strauss (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1978; Strauss, 1995), we do not advocate

the generation of formal theory. See also Clarke (2005: 28–29).

3. On universes of discourse, see, for example, Mead (1917), Shibutani (1955); and Strauss (1978). On

situations, see Clarke (2005). On identities and shared ideologies, see, for example, Strauss (1959, 1993;

Bucher & Stelling, 1977). On commitments, entrepreneurs and mavericks, see Becker (1960, 1963, 1982,

1986). On primary activities, sites, and technology (ies), see Strauss (1978) and Strauss et al. (1985). On

subworlds/segments and reform movements, see Bucher (1962; Bucher & Strauss, 1961) and Clarke and

Montini (1993). On bandwagons and doability, see Fujimura (1987, 1988, 1992, 1996). On intersec-

tions and segmentations, see Strauss (1984). On implicated actors and actants, see Clarke and Montini

(1993), Clarke (2005), Christensen and Casper (2000), and Star and Strauss (1999). On boundary objects

and infrastructures, see Star and Griesemer (1989) and Bowker and Star (1999). On work objects, see

Casper (1994, 1998b). On conventions, see Becker (1982) and Star (1991b). On social worlds theory

more generally, see Clarke (2006c).

4. Boundaries of social worlds may cross-cut or be more or less contiguous with those of formal orga-

nizations, distinguishing social worlds/arenas theory from most organizations theory (Strauss 1982,

1993; Clarke 1991, 2005).

5. The term actant is used thanks to Latour (1987). Keating and Cambrosio (2003) have critiqued the

“social worlds” perspective for minimizing the signiﬁcance of the nonhuman—tools, techniques, and

research materials. This is rather bizarre, since we were among the earliest in STS to write on these

topics. See Clarke (1987), Star (1989a), and Clarke and Fujimura (1992), and for a broader review, Clarke

and Star (2003).

6. Warwick Anderson taught Becker’s book in an STS course at Harvard (personal communication,

2005).

7. Special thanks to Geof Bowker (personal communication, 7/03). See also Star (1991a,b, 1995c),

Fujimura (1991), Clarke and Montini (1993), and Clarke (2005: 60–63).

8. Mol (Mol & Messman, 1996; Mol, 2002) has erroneously insisted that the interactionist concept of

perspective “means” that the “same” thing is merely “viewed” differently across perspectives. On the

contrary, we assert that many different “things” are actually perceived according to perspective. More-

over, actions are taken based on those perceptions of things as different. We suspect that Mol has not

adequately grasped the interactionist assumption that there can be “cooperation without consensus”

illustrated several times in this section, nor that perspective, from an interactionist stance, is not a

cognitive-ideal concept.

9. Ganchoff (2004) examines social worlds and the growing arena of stem cell research and politics.

130 Adele E. Clarke and Susan Leigh Star

HTN05 5/8/07 09:51 AM Page 130

10. Baszanger’s study goes beyond most others in the social worlds/arenas tradition by also studying

patients’ perceptions of and perspectives on pain medicine. Pain itself has simultaneously become a

stand-alone disease label and an arena at the international level.

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Dec 2020

Adele E. Clarke

Working together: Symbolic interactionism, activity theory, and information systems

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Oct 1996

Susan Leigh Star

This book brings together contributions from researchers within various social science disciplines who seek to redefine the methods and topics that constitute the study of work. They investigate work activity in ways that do not reduce it to a 'psychology' of individual cognition nor to a 'sociology' of societal structures and communication. A key theme in the material is the relationship between theory and practice. This is not an abstract problem of interest merely to social scientists. Rather, it is discussed as an issue that working people address when they attempt to understand a task and communicate its demands. Mindful practices and communicative interaction are examined as situated issues at work in the reproduction of communities of practice in a variety of settings including: courts of law, computer software design, the piloting of airliners, the coordination of air traffic control, and traffic management in underground railway systems.

The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture

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