Drawing on an ethnographic study of the installation and maintenance of Paris subway wayfinding system, this article attempts to discuss and specify previous claims that highlight stability and immutability as crucial aspects of material ordering processes. Though in designers’ productions, subway signs have been standardized and their consistency has been invested in to stabilize riders’ environment, they appear as fragile and transforming entities in the hands of maintenance workers. These two situated accounts are neither opposite nor paradoxical: they enact different (...) versions of subway signs, the stabilization of which goes through the acknowledgment of their vulnerability. Practices that deal with material fragility are at the center of what we propose, following Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, to term a care of things. Foregrounding such a care of things is a way to surface a largely overlooked dimension of material ordering and to renew how maintainability issues are generally tackled. (shrink)

Born in the 17th century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies, and civically challenging a state of knowledge. Such a situation is particularly conducive to clarifying the processes of valuation and evaluation in journal peer review. In this article, such processes (...) are considered as specific tests in order to emphasize the uncertain properties of pre-tests manuscripts. On the one hand, evaluation tests are examined at the core of the validation of manuscripts, such as defining the coordination of judging instances or controlling the modalities of inter-knowledge between reviewers and authors. They are also studied regarding the dissemination of articles, notably through the contemporary conception of a continuing evaluation test termed “post publication peer review”. On the other hand, valuation tests are both part of the validation of manuscripts, such as the weighting of different judgments of the same manuscript and the tensions that these hierarchies cause, and of the dissemination of articles, such as attention metrics recording the uses of articles. The conclusion sketches out how the articulation of these different tests has recently empowered readers as a new key judging instance for dissemination and for validation, potentially transforming the definition of peers, and thus the whole process of journal peer review. (shrink)

Studies of scientific authorship have been developing for forty years. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly well documented. However, most of these studies deal with fields considered in only one national context. This article tries to understand the specific modalities of sociological authorship within two national contexts: the United States and France. The analysis yields an understanding of the logic intimately linking texts and contexts, throwing light not only on the way research and authorship practices are partly shaped by their particular (...) institutional and historical contexts but also on the interactions between cognitive content and patterns of publication. (shrink)

Key activities in biomedicine and related research rely on collections of biological samples and related files. Access to such resources in industry and in academic contexts has become strategic and represents a central issue in the general framework of rising patenting practices and in debates about the knowledge economy. It raises important issues concerning the organisation of scientific and medical work, the outline of data-sharing guidelines, and science policy's contribution to the elaboration of an adapted framework. This paper presents an (...) ethnographic study of three French human biobanks. Building on field work (participant observation and in-depth interviews), the study focuses on data access in the concrete practices in biobanks. The paper develops a perspective based on an analysis of different exchange regimes. We argue that access practices are submitted to the different regimes that can coexist and be articulated within the daily activities of each biobank. We also discuss how this perspective can further our understanding of biomedical research, and how it might inform data access policy. (shrink)

L'étude de la collaboration scientifique à partir de la publication se développe depuis une quarantaine d'années. Souvent considérée comme un indicateur (notamment de productivité), elle est ici saisie en se focalisant sur les pratiques de signature et ce qu'elles révèlent. Considérant un corpus d'articles dans trois disciplines, l'analyse se déploie à un double niveau : interdisciplinaire, et international pour une même discipline. Ce travail, inscrit dans une perspective diachronique, tente de cerner les multiples dimensions qui lient les textes à leurs (...) contextes historique et disciplinaire. Dans ce façonnage complexe, l'entrée par les diverses pratiques de signature permet de reconsidérer le statut analytique de la publication scientifique, et de poser la question des frontières entre disciplines en d'autres termes. (shrink)