Deciphering Science and Technology The Social Relations of Expertise

As science and technology have pervaded modern life to an ever greater degree, social scientists have been led to find questions of the causes and consequences of 'expert' knowledge arising in places that would have been felt unlikely hitherto. Varcoe, McNeil and Yearley's book assembles nine exemplary studies by sociologists, each of which explores an aspect of the current scientific-technological 'revolution'. Some popular ideas are challenged. So, too, implicitly, are certain large-scale social scientific theories claiming to have discerned in science and technology an overall meaning.

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: The Centrality of Science and Technology; I.Varcoe & S.Yearley - The State, War and Technical Innovation in Great Britain, 1930-50: The Contrasts of Military and Civil Industry; D.Edgerton - Who Gets Science Education; A.Kelly - Conceptions of British Employment Re-structuring in the 1980s; A.Pollert - Unhealthy Displays? Trade Unions, VDUs and the Social Construction of a Health Hazard; P.Glasner & D.Travis - New Technology and the Self-Disciplined Worker in the Insurance Industry; D.Knights & A.Sturdy - The Automation of Grain Terminal Elevators in Canada; J.Novek - The Incorporation of Biotechnology into Plant Breeding in Cambridge; A.Webster - The Story of r2: Interest, Enrolment and Analogy in a Public Health Debate; M.Bartley - The Conduct of Medical Consultations in an Echocardiography Unit; J.Daly, I.McDonald & E.Willis - Index