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Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, by Karin Knorr Cetina. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 329 pp. $45.00 clock. ISBN: 0-674-25893-- 2. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0-674-25894-0.
The opening paragraph of Karin Knorr Cetina's book defines epistemic cultures as "those amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms-bonded through affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence-which, in a given field, make up how we know what we know" (p. 1 ). Rather than reflecting a more traditional focus on the sociology of knowledge production, this work aims to investigate the "construction of the machineries of knowledge construction" and to "amplify the knowledge machineries of contemporary sciences until they display the smear of technical, social, symbolic dimensions of intricate expert systems" (p. 3). Actually, the coverage is even broader, ranging from the social structure of science to the self-reported perspectives of individual scientists.
The book presents results of Knorr Cetina's studies of experimental high-energy physics at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN), and a molecular cell biology research group that began in Heidelberg and continued work at the Max Planck Institute. Knorr Cetina collaborated with several field ethnographers in gathering researchers' notes, written correspondence, and audio tapes of interviews and other...