The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into (...) an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

Nous chercherons ici à montrer comment le projet Tela Botanica permet à la fois une transformation et une actualisation du savoir botanique. Trois éléments particuliers retiendront notre attention : la libre circulation et la mise à disposition des données les plus récentes du travail des botanistes ; l’articulation nouvelle entre le travail scientifique des amateurs et celui des professionnels ; la création d’une forme organisationnelle hybride combinant des éléments propres au milieu associatif et à l’entreprise privée. Nous utiliserons ces trois (...) axes d’analyse tour à tour, en fournissant des exemples et des réflexions théoriques pour chacun.This article illustrates how the Tela Botanica project is simultaneously transforming botanical knowledge and breathing new life into the field of botany. We discuss three characteristics in particular: the ready availability and free circulation of the most up-to-date botanical data, new links between the scientific work of amateur and professional botanists and the appearance of a hybrid organisational form that combines features from the non-profit model and from private enterprise. We examine these three characteristics in turn, with examples and theoretical discussions in each case. (shrink)