Making an Issue out of a Standard: Storytelling Practices in a Scientific Community

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science, technology, & human values technology, & human values, 2013-01, Vol.38 (1), p.7-43
Main Authors: Millerand, Florence, Ribes, David, Baker, Karen S., Bowker, Geoffrey C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Community
Community ecology
Community Research
Conflict
Cooperation
Ecological research
Ecology
Environmental Factors
Ethnography
Information management
Information standards
Information technology
Institutionalization
Metadata
Metadata standards
Narratives
Scientific Community
Sense making
Social sciences
Sociology
Sociology of knowledge and ethics
Sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture
Sociology of science
Standardization
Stories
Story telling
Storytelling
Synecology
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Summary:The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills' classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the "hands-on" social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences.
ISSN:0162-2439
1552-8251
DOI:10.1177/0162243912437221