This brief essay introduces a special issue dedicated to exploring two themes: “science and work” and “science as work.” Following a brief overview of these two themes, it briefly describes the other contributions to the special issue.

This introductory article frames our special issue in terms of how historicizing research integrity and fraud can benefit current discussions of scientific conduct and the need to improve public trust in science.

A flurry of discussions about plagiarism and predatory publications in recent times has brought the issue of scientific misconduct in India to the fore. The debate has framed scientific misconduct in India as a recent phenomenon. This article questions that framing, which rests on the current tendency to define and police scientific misconduct as a matter of individual behavior. Without ignoring the role of individuals, this article contextualizes their actions by calling attention to the conduct of the institutions, as well (...) as social and political structures that are historically responsible for governing the practice of science in India since the colonial period. Scientific conduct, in other words, is here examined as a historical phenomenon borne of the interaction between individuals’ aspirations and the systems that impose, measure, and reward scientific output in particular ways. Importantly, historicizing scientific misconduct in this way also underscores scientist-driven initiatives and regulatory interventions that have placed India at the leading edge of reform. With the formal establishment of the Society for Scientific Values in 1986, Indian scientists became the first national community worldwide to monitor research integrity in an institutionally organized way. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper charts eighteenth-century chemistry's transition from its definition as an art to its proclaimed status as a science. Both the general concept of art and specific practices of eighteenth-century chemists are explored to account for this transition. As a disciplined activity, art orients practitioners' attention toward particular directions and away from others, providing a structured space of possibilities within which their discipline develops. Consequently, while chemists throughout the eighteenth century aspired to reveal nature's “true voice,” the path of (...) their investigations was directed by and toward their laboratory manipulations. So long as the chemical community maintained an ethos of polite cooperation and eschewed theoretical wrangling, this point was hidden by a rhetoric of “matter of fact” reporting. But as “facts” mounted in the 1770s and 1780s, especially in pneumatic chemistry, cooperation gave way to contention as chemists sought to name and organize their findings without the guidance of a communally accepted “natural” system. Lavoisier and his fellow “new” chemists offered a forceful solution to this dilemma by introducing a revolutionary network of theories, nomenclature, and instruments that unabashedly fused the productive manipulation of their laboratory work with what they claimed as the structure and activity of nature. (shrink)

In their recent book The colonial machine, James McClellan III and François Regourd detail how ancien regime France’s government marshalled science in the service of colonial expansion. By focusing on the local and long distance struggles to make the Isle de France a globally significant centre during the long eighteenth century, this essay suggests an alternative to McClellan and Regourd’s geography of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, as well as their claim that the investigation of nature was tied to colonial (...) expansion by state centralization. Rather than view centralization as a double process whereby a metropolitan state is able to dominate increasingly peripheral territory by concentrating power and the means of its production and management under state authority, this essay argues that centralization occurred in numerous places and involved the organization, pursuit and management of various sorts of accumulation, with geographically extensive consequences. The goal is to present centralization as historically open and multi-centred, inviting examination of both its local dynamics and long-distance entanglements from various perspectives, which in turn reveals the multi-centred dynamics of empire building and governance, including the organization and pursuit of natural inquiry. (shrink)

As global history continues to take shape as an important field of research, its interactive relationships with the history of science, technology, and medicine are recognized and being investigated as significant areas of concern. Strangely, despite the fact that it is key to understanding so many of the subjects that are central to global history and would itself benefit from a broader geographical perspective, the history of chemistry has largely been left out of this process – particularly for the modern (...) historical period. This article argues for the value of integrating the history of chemistry with global history, not only for understanding the past, but also for thinking about our shared present and future. Toward this end, it explores the various ways in which ‘chemistry’ has and can be defined, with special attention to discussions of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’; examines the benefits of organizing historical inquiry around the evolving sociomaterial identities of substances; considers ways in which the concepts of ‘chemical governance’ and ‘chemical expertise’ can be expanded to match the complexities of global history, especially in relation to environmental issues, climate change, and pollution; and seeks to sketch the various geographies entailed in bringing the history of chemistry together with global histories. (shrink)

This introduction to the Focus section “Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together” considers the need for and implications of a labor history of science. What would the broad contours of such an approach be? And what new insights, into both the past and the present, could be revealed? The contributions to this Focus section show how a labor history of science broadens our understanding of the practice and practitioners of science. They also use (...) these historical narratives recursively, to reflect on the practice of doing history of science. And they suggest that we come up short in our obligations to the labor of our field’s past and present. This introduction offers a brief overview of the points of intersection between the fields of labor history and history of science and indicates where these intersections might be more profitably developed. (shrink)

This article offers suggestions for what a labor history of science might look like and what it might accomplish. It does so by first reviewing how historians of science have analyzed the history of both “science as labor” and “science and labor” since the 1930s. It then moves on to discuss recent historiographical developments in both the history of science and labor history that together provide an analytical frame for further research. The article ends by projecting into the future, considering (...) how a labor history of science might help us grapple with connecting our understanding of the past with the challenges of today and tomorrow. (shrink)

Historiography in a metaphysical mode Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9524-6 Authors Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, CETCOPRA/Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, 17 Rue de la Sorbonne, 75231 Paris Cedex05, France Jan Golinski, Department of History, University of New Hampshire, 20 Academic Way, Durham, NH 03824, USA Lissa L. Roberts, Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of Twente, Postbox 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands John McEvoy, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN (...) 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

This introductory essay frames our special issue by discussing how attention to the history of research integrity and fraud can stimulate new historical and methodological insights of broader import to historians of science.

This essay introduces a special issue dedicated to the theme ‘accumulation and management in global historical perspective’. The concepts and practices of accumulation and management are explored in ways that work to de-center the history of science and empire. Particular attention is paid to four intertwined elements: 1) the networked location of centres of accumulation around the world; 2) knowledge as a tool, object and consequence of accumulation; 3) the complex interactions between management and governance; and 4] the geographically dispersed (...) processes of ascribing value. (shrink)

The effect of gamma irradiation on the dislocation relaxation peak, i.e. the Bordoni peak, of high purity polycrystalline gold has been studied at frequency of 10MHz. It was found that the effect of gamma radiation is more significant in specimen irradiation at room temperature (1A) than that irradiated at liquid nitrogen temperature. The variation of the peak height, and temperature of the dislocation relaxation peak as a function of gamma doses are explained in terms of the Kink-Pair formation model.