Epistemic Cultures

“[Karin Knorr Cetina] has studied the behavior and practices of physicists in the process of trying to acquire knowledge of the basic components of the universe, and of biologists seeking empirical knowledge of natural objects. According to Cetina, the way the two groups go about their business is fundamentally different, and this difference has something to tell us about how we know what we know… A thorough and thoughtful examination of the epistemic underpinning of a knowledge society.”—M. H. Chaplin, Choice

“There are many provocative and very interesting things in this book, above all the fairly dramatic and systematic contrast between the working cultures and organizational structures of experimental high energy physics laboratories and molecular biology ones. The opening framework for contrasting these two sciences by their empirical, technological, and social machineries is enormously suggestive. All this should help set a working agenda for anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science and technology of how to explore, elaborate, and expand upon the now often stated proposition that the sciences are diverse in their methods and approaches to the world.”—Michael M. J. Fisher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology