Untangling context: Understanding a university laboratory

The past twenty years have been an incredibly productive period in science studies. Still, because recent work in science studies puts a spotlight on agency and enabling situa-tions, many practitioners in the field ignore, underplay, or dismiss the possibility that historically established, structurally stable attributes of the world may systemically shape practice at the laboratory level. This article questions this general position. Draw-ing on data from a participant observation study of a university biology laboratory, it describes five features of the institutional landscape that shape this laboratory’s practice. The past twenty years have been an incredibly productive period in sci-ence and technology studies. Most fundamentally, recent research has helped challenge idealized images of science as a distinctive asocial realm in which strict adherence to formal rules allows scientists to &dquo;read&dquo; nature to explain the operation of physical and biological systems. Such an idealized image has been replaced by a picture of science-as-craft in which practical reason-ers act in local contexts in often highly contingent ways.