Well-Pressed Stories

These well-written case studies and theoretical discussions show how widely Pickering's depiction of scientific practice as mangling can be applied. Some of the diverse topics will surely be new to readers, but this review questions the flattening of the cultural or social that happens when narratives and theory discount regularities in the resistances and accommodations that human agents experience as well as their conscious awareness of such regularities as social structuredness. Little is gained by anthropomorphizing the non-human and reducing to the common denominator of resistance or accommodation human purposes, motivations, imagination, and understandings of social structuredness. Indeed, important dimensions can be lost: the "thick of things," "complexity," and "inextricable hybridity" are much invoked, but not especially evident in this anthology's cases. Readers will find much more emphasis on disturbing a big Culture and Nature opposition, with the latter subject to domination and control at the hands of "traditional science."