Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 31 Community and Identity in Contemporary Technosciences Karen Kastenhofer Susan Molyneux-Hodgson Editors Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook Volume 31 Managing Editor Peter Weingart, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany Editorial Board Members Ulrike Felt, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Michael Hagner, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Stephen H. Hilgartner, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Unversity, Cambridge, MA, USA Sabine Maasen, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany Everett Mendelsohn, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max-Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, Berlin, Germany Terry Shinn, GEMAS Maison des Sciences de l ’ Homme, Paris, France Richard D. Whitley, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Björn Wittrock, SCASSS, Uppsala, Sweden More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6566 Karen Kastenhofer • Susan Molyneux-Hodgson Editors Community and Identity in Contemporary Technosciences Editors Karen Kastenhofer Institute of Technology Assessment Austrian Academy of Sciences Vienna, Austria Susan Molyneux-Hodgson Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology University of Exeter Exeter, United Kingdom ISSN 0167-2320 ISSN 2215-1796 (electronic) Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook ISBN 978-3-030-61727-1 ISBN 978-3-030-61728-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61728-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface This volume resulted from two conference panels and one dedicated workshop. In September 2014, Susan Molyneux-Hodgson (then University of Shef fi eld) and Morgan Meyer (then Agro ParisTech) organised a panel on ‘ Synthesising futures: Analysing the socio-technical production of knowledge and communities ’ at the biennial conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) in Torun, Poland. Two years later, in September 2016, Karen Kastenhofer (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Sarah Schönbauer (then Uni- versity of Vienna), and Niki Vermeulen (University of Edinburgh) organised a track on a related theme, ‘ (Techno)science by other means of communality and identity ’ , at the EASST conference in Barcelona, Spain. Then, in February 2017, Karen Kastenhofer (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Martina Merz (Alpen Adria Univer- sity Klagenfurt), Ulrike Felt, Max Fochler, Anna Pichelstorfer (University of Vienna), and Niki Vermeulen (University of Edinburgh) organised a three day workshop on ‘ Community and identity in contemporary technosciences ’ in Vienna, Austria, 1 co-funded by EASST, STS Austria, and the Austrian Science Fund (via project V 383-G15). This fi nal event sought to bring the various strands of the almost 3-year discussion into dialogue with each other and establish a statement on the state of the art on community and identity in technoscience. The 2017 Vienna workshop saw 16 papers presented and discussed. Nine of those papers have now been revised and written up for this volume, and four further contributions have been solicited from the two previous events. We want to thank all the participants involved in the conferences and workshop – whether speaking or in the audiences – for their contributions to this collective endeavour! The contributions in this volume bene fi ted from an extensive review process that included not only the editorial board of the Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook series and the guest editors of this volume but also a large number of external 1 http://www.sts-austria.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Programm_CIT_HP.pdf. Accessed 24 April 2019. v reviewers that provided helpful feedback and thereby supported this project funda- mentally. Among the latter feature Sandra Beaufays (University of Duisburg-Essen), Bernadette-Bensaude-Vincent (professor emeritus, Université Paris I Panthéon- Sorbonne), Alexander Bogner (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Jane Calvert (Uni- versity of Edinburgh), Ana Delgado (University of Oslo), Max Fochler (University of Vienna), Scott Frickel (Brown University), Stephen Hilgartner (Cornell Univer- sity), Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter), Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer (Charles Uni- versity, Prague), Sabine Maasen (Technical University of Munich/Munich Center for Technology in Society), Robert Meckin (University of Manchester), Morgan Meyer (Mines ParisTech, PSL University), Monika Nerland (University of Oslo), Bart Penders (Maastricht University), Simone Rödder (University of Hamburg), Philip Shapira (University of Manchester and Georgia Institute of Technology), Lisa Sigl (University of Vienna), Esther Turnhout (Wageningen University), Niki Vermeulen (University of Edinburgh), Caroline Wagner (Ohio State University), Bridgette Wessels (University of Glasgow), Matthias Wienroth (Newcastle Univer- sity), and Sally Wyatt (Maastricht University) as reviewers of individual chapters and four anonymous reviewers of the entire volume. We hope you fi nd the volume as interesting and useful as we have found the process of discussing and collating contributors ’ ideas! Institute of Technology Assessment Austrian Academy of Sciences Vienna, Austria Karen Kastenhofer Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology University of Exeter, UK Exeter, UK May 2020 Susan Molyneux-Hodgson vi Preface Contents 1 Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Karen Kastenhofer and Susan Molyneux-Hodgson Part I Synthetic Communities 2 Remaining Central and Interdisciplinary: Conditions for Success of a Research Speciality at the University of Strasbourg (1961 – 2011) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Marianne Noël 3 What Synthetic Biology Aims At: Review Articles as Sites for Constructing and Narrating an Emerging Field . . . . . . 65 Clemens Blümel 4 The Emergence of Technoscienti fi c Fields and the New Political Sociology of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Benjamin Raimbault and Pierre-Benoît Joly 5 Self-Organisation and Steering in International Research Collaborations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Inga Ulnicane 6 The Project-ed Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Béatrice Cointe 7 The Epistemic Importance of Novices: How Undergraduate Students Contribute to Engineering Laboratory Communities . . . . 145 Caitlin Donahue Wylie 8 Tracing Technoscienti fi c Collectives in Synthetic Biology: Interdisciplines and Communities of Knowledge Application . . . . . 163 Alexander Degelsegger-M á rquez vii 9 Community by Template? Considering the Role of Templates for Enacting Membership in Digital Communities of Practice . . . . . 183 Juliane Jarke Part II Troubled Identities 10 Performing Science in Public: Science Communication and Scienti fi c Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Sarah R. Davies 11 Being a ‘ Good Researcher ’ in Transdisciplinary Research: Choreographies of Identity Work Beyond Community . . . . . . . . . . 225 Andrea Schikowitz 12 Constructing (Inter)Disciplinary Identities: Biographical Narrative and the Reproduction of Academic Selves and Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Carlos Cuevas-Garcia 13 ‘ Big Interdisciplinarity ’ : Unsettling and Resettling Excellence . . . . 263 Bettina Bock von Wül fi ngen 14 A Passion for Science: Addressing the Role of Emotions in Identities of Biologists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Sarah M. Schönbauer Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 viii Contents Contributors Clemens Blümel Research area ‘ Research Systems and Science Dynamics ’ , German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Berlin, Germany Béatrice Cointe CNRS, Centre de Sociologie de l ’ Innovation, i3, Mines ParisTech, PSL, Paris, France Carlos Cuevas-Garcia Munich Center for Technology and Society (MCTS), Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany Sarah R. Davies Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Alexander Degelsegger-M á rquez Executive Unit of Digital Health and Innova- tion, Gesundheit Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria Juliane Jarke Institute for Information Management Bremen (i fi b) & Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany Pierre-Benoît Joly Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), CNRS, INRAE, Université Gustave Eiffel, Marne-la-Vallée, France Karen Kastenhofer Institute of Technology Assessment, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria Susan Molyneux-Hodgson Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropol- ogy, University of Exeter, Devon, UK Marianne Noël Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), CNRS, INRAE, Université Gustave Eiffel, Marne-la-Vallée, France Benjamin Raimbault Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), CNRS, INRAE, Université Gustave Eiffel, Marne-la-Vallée, France ix Andrea Schikowitz Friedrich Schiedel Endowed Chair for Sociology of Science, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany Sarah M. Schönbauer Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Munich, Germany Inga Ulnicane Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK Bettina Bock von Wül fi ngen Department of Cultural History and Theory, Hum- boldt University, Berlin, Germany Caitlin D. Wylie Program in Science, Technology, and Society, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA x Contributors List of Figures Fig. 2.1 Jean-Marie Lehn ’ s co-publications pro fi le . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Fig. 2.2 The ISIS building at the University of Strasbourg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Fig. 3.1 Number of review articles in the sample corpus per year (2002 – 2012) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Fig. 4.1 References co-citation map . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . 93 Fig. 4.2 Global population statistics for the synbio community over time . . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . 98 Fig. 4.3 Position analysis of the main actors in the synbio community according to centrality and impact .. . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . .. . 99 Fig. 5.1 Stylised model of long-term international collaboration process in nano S&T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Fig. 5.2 Stylised model of ‘ long informal collaboration ’ . . .. . . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . 121 Fig. 5.3 Stylised model of ‘ novel project ’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Fig. 9.1 Screenshot of ePractice case template . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Fig. 10.1 Ocean of resources . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . 214 Fig. 10.2 Breaking and entering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Fig. 13.1 Interdisciplinary Laboratory. Cluster of Excellence Image, Knowledge Gestaltung .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . . .. 271 xi List of Tables Table 2.1 Number of occurrences of ‘ supramolecular ’ in the 1987 Nobel lectures of the three laureates . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . 48 Table 2.2 List of symposia on and surrounding SMC (1988 – 1997) . . . . . . . . . 54 Table 3.1 Document types in synthetic biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Table 3.2 Top ten review articles of synthetic biology by times citation .. . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . 71 Table 4.1 Repartition of core-group members according their contribution to the Synbio sub fi elds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Table 5.1 Key characteristics of the two case studies of international collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Table 5.2 Summary of elements and effects of self-organisation and steering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Chapter 1 Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience Karen Kastenhofer and Susan Molyneux-Hodgson 1.1 New Wine in Old Bottles? Modern societies are changing and the sciences ’ character, institutions and functions change with them. From Price ’ s (1963) ‘ Big Science ’ , via Gibbons and colleagues ’ (1994) ‘ mode 2 knowledge production ’ to Haraway ’ s (1996) technoscience or Nordmann and colleagues ’ (2011) discussion of the epochal break thesis, from accounts of the universities ’ new entrepreneurialism and critical discussions of an ongoing projecti fi cation of scienti fi c work and its repercussions on the various dimensions of ‘ epistemic living spaces ’ (Felt 2009; Felt 2016) to the diagnosis of a ‘ medialization ’ of science (Weingart 2012), the sociology of science literature points at an ongoing qualitative change in the scienti fi c system at large, linked to wider societal changes through processes of co-production (Jasanoff 2006). With these accounts of fundamental change comes the necessity to re-evaluate classical conceptions of scienti fi c sociality and identity as they have been promulgated with the emergence of the sociology of science over the past century. Such a re-evaluation is very likely not only faced with shifts in its empirical attention, but also with persisting conceptual weaknesses, ambiguities, even incommensurabilities, and several theoretical turns and diversi fi cations that the fi eld has undergone. In addition, some formerly less contested concepts may have become the battleground of far more fundamental and politically laden con fl icts within the wider context of socie- ties at large. One may thus be tempted to simply omit former horizons of analysis K. Kastenhofer ( * ) Institute of Technology Assessment, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: karen.kastenhofer@oeaw.ac.at S. Molyneux-Hodgson Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: s.hodgson@exeter.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2021 K. Kastenhofer, S. Molyneux-Hodgson (eds.), Community and Identity in Contemporary Technosciences , Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61728-8_1 1 such as those of (scienti fi c) community and identity, to shelve them as outdated themes in view of these many complicating facets. This book is dedicated to pursuing another route. Admittedly, the concepts of both ‘ community ’ and ‘ identity ’ have complex histories, they span multiple social sciences and seem to hit a nerve in contemporary society in a way that complicates their scienti fi c discussion. This situation is not improved by their initial transfer from general sociology to the sociology of science having happened in a seemingly haphazard manner. Nevertheless, our premise is that the study of scienti fi c commu- nities and identities is of enduring importance, evidenced by ongoing, lively research interest as well as science policy initiatives that explicitly target these two dimen- sions of science and our ambition is to not shy away from a complex and compli- cated theme. We also hold that to discuss both concepts in relation to each other allows for a deeper understanding. Our starting point here is to explore new work that addresses community and identity constellations within contemporary techno-scienti fi c environments. On this basis, we ask how we can make sense of conceptions of community and identity in the rapidly shifting contexts in which scienti fi c and technical actors work. What do, or can, ‘ community ’ and ‘ identity ’ mean in these times of strategic science, transdisciplinarity and identity politicking? What can we gain from discussing both, community and identity, together? Unavoidably, we will thus touch on theoretical weaknesses, unsolved puzzles and societal nerves linked to these con- cepts. This work can hence only be an effort in initiating — or better — reviving a research programme that is as old as the sociology of science itself. Our central thesis holds that scienti fi c identity and community still matter in many respects, but that they have changed fundamentally during the past decades, in their character, qual- ities, roles and accomplishments. They have done so alongside shifts in the discourse of science-society relations and with some major modi fi cations in scienti fi c gover- nance regimes. Moreover, we must explicitly acknowledge that changes in scienti fi c communality impinge on options for, and the signi fi cance of, identity; and changes in scienti fi c identity constellations impinge on options for, and characteristics of, community. In this chapter, we begin with an empirical case that we have both encountered, independently, and that has challenged our own thinking, provoking us to re-open the black boxes of ‘ community ’ and ‘ identity ’ and to re-address their conceptual basis. We then move on to a short delineation of the conceptualisations of commu- nity and identity in past sociologies of science. Consecutively, we present the chapters of this volume, their takes on community and identity constellations and effects on the contemporary technosciences as institutions, practices and living spaces. We do so with a focus on common themes that we have pulled to the fore from the various contributions. In a fi nal discussion, we take stock of where our attempt at re-addressing community and identity in contemporary technoscienti fi c contexts has brought us, which ambiguities could not be resolved and which questions seem promising starting points for further conceptual and empirical endeavour. The fi nal assessment of whether the task of fi lling new wine into old 2 K. Kastenhofer and S. Molyneux-Hodgson bottles is worth the effort, is left to the reader and to the next generation of sociologists of science. 1.2 Staged Communities, Manufactured Disciplines, and Strategic Identities In 2003, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a new social format for undergraduate science students to gather, collaborate, and compete; to learn; and to construct, re fl ect on, and sell their own visionary products. All this took place in the context of a fairly new research area labelled ‘ synthetic biology ’ , depicted as the rational engineering of biological systems at all levels of hierar- chy — from individual molecules to whole organisms (cp. e.g. Serrano 2007). Now- adays, around 6000 people each year — primarily university students — gather in multidisciplinary teams, work on a self-de fi ned project ‘ to design, build, test, and measure a system of their own design using interchangeable biological parts and standard molecular biology techniques ’ , and present their results at an annual Jamboree — the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. This annual process is depicted as ‘ instrumental in the building of the discipline of synthetic biology ’ , ‘ appeal[ing] to young minds ’ , and ‘ captur[ing] the attention of industry academics and governments ’ . In 2017, the iGEM Foundation added an ‘ After iGEM program ’ , supporting a ‘ global network ’ of former participants, includ- ing a wider network of advisors and staff that support the student endeavour. In its own depiction, ‘ [t]his global network is leading the fi eld, taking what they learned in the competition and expanding it to continue to build a better world. ’ 1 The phenomenon of iGEM has been addressed within science (e.g. Goodman 2008; Smolke 2009; Dixon and Kuldell 2011; Kelwick et al. 2015; Tsui and Meyer 2016) as well as among STS scholars (e.g., Balmer and Bulpin 2013; Damm et al. 2013; Frow and Calvert 2013; Mercer 2015), as has the phenomenon of synthetic biology more broadly. In these works, iGEM is discussed in terms such as: an educational experiment; a medium for the development and sharing of a normative ethos; an extended re fl exivity within science; and an essential (or illustrative) part of an ongoing scienti fi c revolution. It is safe to say that the phenomena of iGEM and synthetic biology have become foci of re fl ection and analysis in both technical and sociological camps, leading to interestingly similar topics and threads of discussion (varying mostly in the amount of critique applied and in the mode of ‘ reality ’ attributed to them). Yet, a resolution of what to make of these phenomena is not yet in sight. Do competitions signify an entertaining diversion from the seriousness of the day-to-day business of science (just like the ever-present Gary Larson cartoons in the life sciences ’ laboratories around the world), a strategy to better cope with sometimes boring routines? Are competitions primarily strategic instruments aimed 1 All quotations are from: http://igem.org/Main_Page. Accessed 7 July 2018. 1 Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience 3 at boosting new hype cycles via new buzzword, mobilising new generations of young researchers and triggering new funding (thus denoting speci fi c constellations in the current science governance regime)? Or are fi elds such as synthetic biology and their novel interaction spaces emblematic of fundamental changes within iden- tity constellations and the way communality in science is organised and effectuated? And, if so, how will the ways that collectivity and identity are conceived of and organised within science writ large be affected? iGEM and other new formats of interaction (mobile science festivals, science slams or ‘ dance your PhD ’ competitions) within and beyond science do — in some- times very explicit and strategic ways — address aspects of identity and communal- ity, combining a social engineering attitude with a revolutionary emphasis. iGEM is explicitly advertised as instrumental in ‘ the building of a discipline ’ as well as in the training and moulding of a new generation of scientists. It does so in a way that differs in fundamental ways from a teacher – disciple-based inter-generational inter- action model (Bulpin and Molyneux-Hodgson 2013) or a ‘ purely academic ’ educa- tional vision, without denying its didactic and socialising purpose. But rather than only educating future synthetic biologists and establishing such identi fi cation with a fi eld, iGEM also aims at producing a global network of former participants. iGEM hence constitutes a consciously designed and staged temporal interaction among peers that elicits lasting identi fi cation with the respective event, its participants, and its culture. Moreover it focuses on peer-to-peer interaction rather than inter- generational encounters; on innovation based upon a speci fi c template of parts, actions and interaction patterns rather than on slowly changing disciplinary tradi- tions (with which it aims to break); and on an innovation culture inspired by an idealised atmosphere of friendship-based and fun-fuelled small business incubators rather than a sincere, and serious, tradition-laden ivory tower attitude. Research fi elds such as synthetic biology, systems biology, and nanotechnology have each been presented as ‘ communities to be manufactured ’ by funding initia- tives and science lobbyists alike; by the ‘ European Systems Biology Community ’ initiative promoted by the ‘ Infrastructure for Systems Biology in Europe ’ consor- tium 2 as well as by diverse national funding initiatives that speci fi cally target networking, collaborative projects, or the establishment of temporal, dedicated research centres. But these initiatives do not develop necessarily in ways that lead to a strict identi fi cation of individual scientists with these manufactured communi- ties. Attachments to older labels remain strong even when a scientist ventures into new waters (Molyneux-Hodgson and Meyer 2009), often due to concerns about the transitory nature of funding and research policies. Indeed, the next buzzword is likely to be already waiting in the pipeline of science lobbying and funding net- works, so that over-identi fi cation with an emerging fi eld presents a risk that the label one buys into might not deliver or simply go out of fashion, succeeded by an ever- newer label. What can we make of such ‘ staged ’ or ‘ provisional ’ communities or (labelled) ‘ communities without members ’ (Kastenhofer 2013)? Recent examples 2 http://community.isbe.eu/content/what-site-0, accessed 30 September 2019. 4 K. Kastenhofer and S. Molyneux-Hodgson such as the iGEM competition, or synthetic biology more generally, challenge our conceptualisation of what the character of communality and identity in contempo- rary science is and how it is negotiated, organised, and made use of. The concepts invoke or explicitly build upon traditional categories and understandings of ‘ disci- pline ’ , ‘ community ’ , and ‘ identity ’ , but at the same time call into question the traditional patterns, modes, and reference points of sociality. It is this context in which the analyses presented here are situated. To date, empirical case studies have addressed such new con fi gurations (cp. for identity, e.g. Calvert 2010 for systems biologists, Felt et al. 2013 for sustainability researchers), while theoretical discussions have highlighted changing conceptions and approaches to communality and identity within sociology and social psychology (Wetherell 2010). Overall, these studies and theoretical debates seem to put forward more questions than answers. They point not only to the idea that the institutional, social, and cultural conditions and conceptions of doing and being in science are shifting (Gläser et al. 2016) but also to as-yet unsolved conceptual ambiguities, inconsistencies, and gaps relating to forms of scienti fi c communality and identity. With this in mind, our scope and objective for the book must be outlined in the humblest of ways: it does not claim to interrogate, let alone integrate, all existing conceptual approaches nor to solve the many puzzles accompanying current ques- tions of identity and community in science. Rather, the work is dedicated to (1) illuminating selected new analyses of recent empirical phenomena and contem- porary heterogeneities relating to community and identity with an emphasis on potential changes within the underlying academic milieu; (2) addressing some of the ways community and identity relate to each other in these contemporary con- texts; and (3) indicating how these empirical observations relate to some long- standing theoretical ambiguities and debates. To do so, we have gathered empirical and conceptual studies that can serve as exemplars of the speci fi city of contemporary constellations within the technosciences and that provide discussion of potential conceptual rami fi cations. 1.3 From Communality to Communities — The Socio-Cultural Organisation and Differentiation of Science Within the sociology of the sciences, two modes of referring to scienti fi c community are clearly discernible: early scholars like Hagstrom (Hagstrom 1965) explicitly refer to science as a community in the singular — thereby highlighting the communitarian (and thereby social) aspect of science. Such work is ‘ concerned with the operation of social control within the scienti fi c community, with the problem of discovering the social in fl uences that produce conformity to scienti fi c norms and values. ’ (Ibid, p. 1) Its result is a ‘ social turn ’ in the conception of science, fuelling the emergence of a sociology of science. Later analyses such as Mullins ’ (1972) famous reconstruction 1 Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience 5 of molecular biology ’ s development from a small group of phage specialists to a scienti fi c specialty can be linked to this social conception of science. From there, it seems but a small step to differentiate sub-communities with distinct social and cultural characteristics in the plural — preparing what has much later been labelled as the ‘ cultural turn ’ within science studies. With Hagstrom, the step towards the plural is explained in reference to ‘ the subcommunities of colleagues within which recognition is awarded ’ (ibid, p. 2). Its methodological counterpart consists of a multi-disciplinary empirical sample, including ‘ established ’ and ‘ new ’ disciplines, disciplines in which the ‘ exigencies of research require some formal organisation ’ with disciplines without such exigencies (ibid, p. 4) — a methodological choice that hints at an a priori idea about a socio- cultural differentiation of science into disciplinary (sub)communities and (sub)- cultures. But other than the reference to science as a community in the singular (or Merton ’ s science as a social institution and Polanyi ’ s science as a republic, to add just two further renowned examples), the reference to science as a collection of subcommunities or subcultures not only comes with a plural, it also comes with less conceptual consideration about the character of the social entity these (sub)commu- nities or (sub)cultures represent. 3 As with Hagstrom (1965), the later spike in interest on cultural aspects of science within STS was based upon the theoretical assumption as well as the methodological sine qua non that different cultures co-exist and can be compared on empirical grounds, necessitating the existence of speci fi c social entities that exhibited this cultural plurality and could be studied case-by-case, without theorising the underly- ing socio-cultural differentiation in detail. Fleck (1983 [1974]) — as one prominent forerunner of the cultural turn within science studies — introduced the notions of thought style and thought collective, building on a psychology of perception rather than a socio-epistemological perspective and leaving some essential questions to mere statements, such as the assumption that one can be a member of plural thought collectives. Other early science studies scholars focused on national scienti fi c styles (Jamison 1997) with a focus on the history of scienti fi c ideas. Scholars like Harwood (1993) or Knorr-Cetina (1999) have reconstructed isochronic ‘ styles of scienti fi c thought ’ or ‘ epistemic cultures ’ , whereas scholars like Pickstone (2001) or Hacking (2002) have delineated ‘ ways of knowing ’ or ‘ styles of scienti fi c reasoning ’ in an attempt to develop a historical epistemology (Kusch 2010), but have stayed fuzzy enough about the related social dimensions and entities. 4 With an edited volume on the ‘ regional and national con fi gurations of research fi elds ’ , Merz and Sormani (2016a) provided fundamentally new insights into the socio-political dimensions of localised styles. 3 The speci fi city of scienti fi c communities in comparison to other communities has been highlighted and extemporised in scholarly work on epistemic communities (Meyer and Molyneux-Hodgson 2010) or ‘ wissenschaftliche Produktionsgemeinschaften ’ (Gläser 2006). 4 Historical accounts of (fundamental) change thus culminated in a seemingly unsolvable debate about the validity of the accompanying epochal break theses (e.g. Nordmann et al. 2011) — maybe because the institutional dimension had been unaddressed. 6 K. Kastenhofer and S. Molyneux-Hodgson Thus, scienti fi c communities as socio-cultural phenomena are constantly, if indirectly, addressed as reference points for a socio-cultural diversi fi cation in the scienti fi c production of knowledge. How the social unit of these cultures should be conceived of and how the individual relates to such styles, collectives, and cultures often remains implicit. Specialities, scienti fi c fi elds (Whitley 1984), disciplines, university departments (Becher and Trowler 2001) or novel types of science centres (Hackett and Parker 2016), invisible colleges (Crane 1972), or transepistemic arenas (Knorr-Cetina 1982), opposing politicised networks (Haas 1992, 1994; Bonneuil 2006; Böschen et al. 2010) or Scienti fi c/Intellectual Movements (Frickel and Gross 2005; Parker and Hackett 2012) fi gure as potential suspects to locate and generate diversity. 5 The relation between culture, style, or collective and the individual scientist has also been resolutely fuzzy. Over a certain period, studies of socialisation, enculturation, career tracks, collaboration, and membership aimed to link individuals and their respective collectives. Communities were depicted as effectuated by academic socialisation, academic institutions and research practice, while at the same time being constitutive of the latter (Becker et al. 1961; Liebau and Huber 1985; Traweek 1988; Wenger 1998; Becher and Trowler 2001; Beaufays 2003; Arnold and Fischer 2004). But the more science studies lost interest in the individual as a central site of epistemic action and focussed more on conditions, contexts, networks, actor- networks, and hinterlands, the less salient these themes became. Questions tradi- tionally raised by social psychologists or anthropologists lost momentum. With more recent empirical examples of technoscienti fi c convergence and transformation in the realms of nano-, bio-, info- and cogno-engineering, the disciplinary nature of these phenomena has been called into question on empirical rather than theoretical grounds, rendering disciplinary categories as proxy even less attractive than previ- ously and putting the mode of communality they represent up for discussion (Frickel 2004 on genetic toxicology; Kastenhofer 2013 on systems biology; Lewis and Bartlett 2013 on bioinformatics; Balmer et al. 2016 on synthetic biology; for a general discussion, see also Weber 2010 and Merz and Sormani 2016b). Waves of digitalisation, projecti fi cation, massi fi cation, mediatisation and new public manage- ment seem to overrun scienti fi c institutions, and the signi fi cance of scienti fi c com- munity and specialty communities is once again called into question. Concurrently, calls for the active building and shaping of speci fi c kinds of communities arise 5 In Merton ’ s case, it is the disciplinary layer that is referred to as proxy for a relating social entity. Many other scholars go down the same road without really explicating this choice of proxy: Fleck ’ s (1947/1983) thought collectives are illustrated in reference to disciplines; Knorr-Cetina in her work on epistemic cultures (1999) chooses her empirical cases on a (sub)disciplinary basis — comparing ‘ molecular biology ’ with ‘ experimental high energy physics ’ — and bases her argumentation heavily on these categories. While she does aim at going beyond a disciplinary ontology, ‘ replacing notions such as discipline or specialty with that of an epistemic culture ’ (ibid, p. 3), the (sub)disciplinary categories remain central points of reference in her reconstructive work. Many ensuing empirical studies have aligned with this pattern of taking disciplinary categories as a proxy for social units of cultural differentiation in their methodological approach and argumentation. 1 Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience 7