Managing Laboratory Work through Skepticism: Processes of Evaluation and Control

By Jason Owen-Smith. American Sociological Review, 2001

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Laboratory ethnographies are the shop-floor studies of the knowledge economy. Observational data from 11 months of fieldwork in a multidisciplinary neuroscience lab suggest that scientific skepticism, long understood as an evaluative mechanism, also serves social control and monitoring functions. The author applies insights from organization theory, social psychology, science studies, and the sociology of science to demonstrate that skepticism is socially organized at the microlevel of laboratory interactions. This organization makes skepticism a solution to the problems of control, coordination, and evaluation raised by uncertain scientific work conducted in a physically dispersed multidisciplinary setting. The diverse roles skepticism plays in laboratory interactions resonate with examinations of work in a number of occupational settings while providing direct insight into mechanisms that may account for the patterning of rewards and status across knowledge-intensive workplaces.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1dabd1eab1da63ee036ce9ca10dd90bff2206f9a

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Citations in the corpus

When consumers doubt, Watch out! The role of CSR skepticism (2013, background): “Studies on skepticism extend across a range of disciplines, such as philosophy (e.g., McGrath, 2011), politics (e.g., Taber & Lodge, 2006), sociology (e.g., Owen-Smith, 2001), and psychology (e.g., Forgas & East, 2008).”
Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science (2015, background): “Anthropologists and sociologists have conducted in-depth studies of scientific laboratories in the life sciences, high-energy physics, and other disciplines (e.g., Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Owen-Smith, 2001; Hackett, 2005).”
Ties That Last (2013, background): “This would likely require detailed ethnographic information about collaborations over time (see, e.g., Owen-Smith, 2001).”
Science and the Diffusion of Knowledge (2004, unknown): “A second perspective maintains that science enhances the process of investigation itself: winner-takeall rewards to first discovery promote maximal effort (Merton, 1957; Dasgupta and David, 1994); scientific norms allow for the effective management of research activities (Owen-Smith, 2001); and the ”