Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation in Space Science. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1997  by Thomas F. Gieryn

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Anthropologist Stacia Zabusky spent a year in Noordwijk, Holland doing ethnography in the Space Science Department of the European Space Research and Technology Center - itself part of the European Space Agency (ESA) - and came back with a paradox: cooperation was obvious everywhere in the organization and ideology behind the launching of research satellites, but cooperation was vigorously denied by participating scientists and engineers and rarely visible in their day-to-day interactions. The paradox is resolved via a distinction between structure and practice, an analytical leitmotif that runs throughout this book. As structure, cooperation takes shape on paper as agreements among independent nations to create and financially sustain a European agency for space research and technology. It is also found in the ESA's formal division of labor, which functionally assigns specialized tasks to appropriate experts. Finally, cooperation exists symbolically in exhortations declaring ESA to be a shining example of the promises and payoffs of European unification.

On the ground in Noordwijk, however, cooperation becomes something quite unrelated to these structural contexts, and something ominous. Scientists and engineers treat cooperation as a boundary condition: it is a structural necessity insuring the copious resources required for designing, building, and launching satellites with scientific and industrial payloads, but it is simultaneously outside the "real work" or "working together" that makes up their everyday practices.

Zabusky argues that structures of cooperation are actively resisted because they carry the threat of conformity, predictability, and hierarchy - each of which denies core values of diversity, negotiability, fluidity, and equality. In their practices, scientists and engineers revel in their national differences (Dutch coffee is tolerated unenthusiastically by those from the land of espresso and cafe au lait) and in their occupational or disciplinary differences (scientists can be dreamers, engineers can be pragmatists). But these differences do not rank in any consistent way: egalitarianism prevails in practice, despite bureaucratic chains of command that exist in structure.

Even this is too simple a gloss of Zabusky's argument, for the prevailing trope in Launching Europe is "On the one hand..., on the other hand...." Following Giddens and Bourdieu, structure and practice are recursive: through their local and messy practices, scientists and engineers enact, reproduce, and resist the orderly structures that simultaneously enable and constrain those practices. In the same way, "working together" involves both conflict and harmony, coercion and autonomy, excitement and boredom, commonality and difference. These dichotomies are in practice coexisting "cultural trajectories" within which events and individuals take on distinctive meanings. In a cultural trajectory of harmony, consensus might be desirable as essential for getting the job done (eventually, something must be launched); in a cultural trajectory of conflict, consensus is denounced as erasing vital differences or pursuing an unwanted conformity by coercion. Practice embodies opposites, and Zabusky resists the theoretical temptation to assign either harmony or conflict explanatory priority, thus raising challenge to the "military" metaphor that pervades much current work in science and technology studies: technoscience as war by other means.

Zabusky's analysis of the discursive mechanisms for avoiding hierarchy in everyday practice is especially illuminating. Space scientists and engineers will routinely undercut others' claims to superiority and their accusations of one's own inferiority - evidence of egalitarian impulses. As they approach crucial design decisions with different sets of interests (scientists want satellites with maximal space for their observational instruments, while engineers eat up that payload space with machinery necessary for getting the whole package off the ground safely and efficiently), participants flexibly and contingently valorize the scientist's "vision" and the engineer's "nuts-and-bolts know-how" in ways that prevent either group from ruling the roost. Authority is circulated among participants, as it is translated into responsibility - becoming less a perquisite than an obligation.

The author artfully describes how the endless negotiations that make up scientific and technical practices yield, at the end of the day, structure - in the form of both material and cultural artifacts. In an argument reminiscent of the French ontologist Bruno Latour, Zabusky suggests that the products of all this effort - not just satellites and payloads, but structures of cooperation certain to warm the hearts of politicians back in London, Rome, Paris, or Berlin - are "externalized" by the ESA scientists and engineers who made them. Their negotiated and artifactual qualities are made to disappear, as the products are distanced from the practices that brought them into being. Why? Technical artifacts take on an existence independent of their creators so that finality may be reached: the satellite is said to "demand" certain tolerances or specification, which brings negotiations to an end. In the same way, cooperation gets stabilized in a way that freezes once-provisional agreements - but scientists and engineers deny that they had anything to do with such potentially hegemonic and coercive "structures of cooperation."