‘Lab Hands’ and the ‘Scarlet O’

Abstract

This paper is a history of the promotion and use of models of technical knowledge production over a seven-year period at a modern physics laboratory. In this analysis, models are seen as reflexively performed in the course of laboratory practice and intertwined with issues of authority and control in the laboratory. Attempts to associate or disassociate different models of knowledge production with different identities at play in the laboratory, in particular those of ‘scientist’ and ‘operator’, are traced. The concepts of ‘epistemic politics’ and ‘identity work’ are explicated. To account for the relationship between technical knowledge claims, laboratory identities, modes of accountability, and the control of labor both inside and outside of the laboratory. Changes in this relationship over time at the laboratory are considered. In combining sensibilities from labor relations with insights from science and technology studies (STS) writings on expertise, the paper provides an example of a new kind of laboratory study in which accepted modes of authority and control are seen as implicated in the day to day production of technical knowledge in the laboratory, and performances of ‘legitimate’ means of technical knowledge production, and ‘legitimate’ technical identities, are likewise implicated in the ongoing negotiation of laboratory organization and order. Through this kind of analysis, issues of gender, race, and labor are engaged with the detailed world of technical knowledge production. The status of the account itself as a performance and intervention is highlighted through the intertwined narratives of experience on the part of the author of both the laboratory and of different strands of STS literature.