East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2011) 5:543554 DOI 10.

1215/18752160-1458297

Broadening the Horizons of STS: An Interview with Donald MacKenzie

Conveners: Ruey-Chyi Hwang, Zheng-Feng Li, Chih-Tung Huang Editors: Rong-Xuan Chu, Hang Miao, Lu Gao

Received: 20 July 2011 / Accepted: 20 July 2011 q National Science Council, Taiwan 2011

Abstract With a background in applied mathematics, Prof. Donald MacKenzie has recently been named among the top twenty-ve brains of the nancial crisis. He is also a pioneer in developing the discipline of social studies of nance. For decades, he has explored new elds in the sociology of science and technology, especially those that deeply affect peoples lives, such as the eugenics movement, the accuracy of nuclear weapons, emissions markets, and his recent work on current credit crunch. This interview started with a simple but bafing question: how could it be possible that one plus one does not always equal two? We then attempted to nd a thread from a diversity of his research topics. He responded that most of his studies revolve around the application of mathematics and its impacts on our daily lives. We also asked for his comments on the Bloor-Latour debate. To this request, he replied with what he described as a very biased Edinburgh School answer: he sees the attacks on the Edinburgh School as attacks on a sociologically reductionist misunderstanding of its position. At the end of this interview, he encouraged East Asian scholars to move away from the traditional topics and to be prepared to search for novel ones. Prof. Donald MacKenzie is a major contributor to the eld of science and technology studies and nancial markets. As a so-called Strong Programmer, he is rooted in the University of Edinburgh and has spent most of his career there. Professor MacKenzie received his rst degree in applied mathematics and later went to the then newly established Science Studies Unit. Under Professor Barry Barness supervision, he was introduced to an innovative approach for exploring the relationship between knowledge and society. He soon developed a rich diversity of research interests and published a broad range of widely cited studies on the eugenics movement, the development of nuclear weapons, emissions markets, and the current nancial crisis. These studies have not only become STS classics but have also won him a series of awards,

C.-T. Huang (*) Department of Public Administration, National Open University, No. 172, Zhongzheng Rd., Luzhou Dist., New Taipei City 247, Taiwan e-mail: cthuang@mail.nou.edu.tw

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includingtwicethe Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association. In the wake of credit crunch, his top-notch research opened up new ways of thinking about prices, markets, and institutions. For his outstanding contribution to the eld of social studies of nance, Professor MacKenzie was named in the Prospect list of leading public intellectuals of the nancial crisis, also known as Prospects Top 25 Brains of the crisis (Ford 2009). In 2011 he was elected Fellow of the UKs prestigious Academy of Social Sciences.1 This interview started with a simple but bafing question: how could it be possible that one plus one does not always equal two? Professor MacKenzie potently argued that, with enough imagination, one plus one could be almost anything, even a big bang, which could hardly be considered as two. We then turned our attention to the thread of his diverse research subjects. According to him, most of his research revolves around the application of mathematics and its effect on peoples lives. For example, at rst sight the accuracy of a nuclear missile seems a limited mathematical subject. It is inextricably linked to some wider questions, however, such as the overall nature of the nuclear arms race. In this regard, investigating a small question placed in context may enable one to throw new light on bigger issues. In response to our question about the Bloor-Latour debate, he replied with what he described as a very biased Edinburgh School answer: he sees the attacks on the Edinburgh School as attacks on a sociologically reductionist misunderstanding of its position. At the end of this interview, Professor MacKenzie encouraged East Asian scholars to move away from the traditional topics and to be prepared to look for novel ones. For him, the search for these kinds of intellectual opportunities always holds the key to success. 26 January 2009
CHIH-TUNG HUANG : As a mathematician by training, it might surprise some people that

you took so readily to a relativist methodology, particularly one which would later claim that two plus two does not necessarily equal four! Could you begin by providing us some autobiographical background on what motivated you to conduct research in SSK (sociology of scientic knowledge)?
DONALD MACKENZIE : Well, as you can guess from my name, Donald MacKenzie, Im Scottish; brought up in the Scottish Highlands; came to the University of Edinburgh in 1968 originally to study physics; shifted to applied mathematics. In my third year, I took the undergraduate course in sociology of science offered by [Barry] Barnes in the Science Studies Unit, and basically I discovered that I enjoyed that more than I did maths. And thats how I ended up in this eld. HUANG :

Were there any initial tensions between your mathematical training and the approaches of the Edinburgh School in Science Studies? It wasnt that strange at the time. Here perhaps something about the political circumstances at that time is, I suspect, worth thinking about. It was the time of things like the Vietnam War, the student movement, and the like. And it was part of that process that lots of people in the natural sciences and mathematics

MACKENZIE :

See: www.sps.ed.ac.uk/news/acss_fellowships_for_two_sociology_staff.

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were reecting upon their activities as social, cultural activities, not just as narrow, technical pursuits. So, if you look back into the background, there are quite a few people in history and sociology of science, particularly of that period, youll nd people who actually started out as natural scientists and who made the transition either at the point I did, just after their rst degree, or else in some cases after their PhDs. So there are quite a number of people in the eld. Andrew Pickering,2 for example, is one who became a sociologist only after completing his PhD in physics. It was actually a reasonably common career move at that point.
HUANG : To some of our readers, it might be a bit confusing how it can be possible that

one plus one does not equal two. Well, you know, that is a question you can give a very quick and glib answer to, which is that if you are doing binary arithmetic, then one plus one is one zero, and not two. I said thats glib because, of course, one zero is the representation of two in binary arithmetic. But you also get modulo arithmetic in which those ordinary arithmetic sums arent the case. The way I would think about it is this: if you think about objects in the world, then for sure, a lot of times one plus one is two. May I borrow your pen for a second? One pen, [plus] another pen, [is] two pens. But if outside the window it was raining [pointing at the nearby window], and there is one raindrop, and another raindrop, and they meetone plus one is one. Or, this is one lump of plutonium and this is another lump of plutonium of the correct size, and we bring them together, then one plus one is not two lumps of plutonium but a very big explosion [laughing ]. So in certain sense what arithmetic is doing there is imposing a set of orders on the world, a very useful set of orders, but a set which is not universal. So there is a certain sense in which you can see mathematics as if it were conventional. I am not using the word convention in any pejorative sense, just to say it is possible to mention other arithmetics.
HUANG : The impressive range of issues which you have dealt with in your career range MACKENZIE :

from your thesis research on statistics (which remains a key part of contemporary understanding of the origins of British Social Statistics [MacKenzie 1981] and of late nineteenth-century British society in general), to missile defense systems (MacKenzie 1990), through nancial markets (MacKenzie 2008; MacKenzie and Millo 2003; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007), to your recent work on carbon markets and the credit crunch. Is there a thread behind it? From missile to nancial crisis, they are quite different, arent they?
MACKENZIE :

Well, it isnt, it isnt. Because in fact if you look at the mathematics underpinning missile guidance and the mathematics underpinning, not all nancial derivatives, but certainly a good number of nancial derivatives, youll actually nd close similarities between the maths. But I think also there is a kind of deeper similarity because what I do is to look for topics that have got two features. First of all, that

Pickering is the author of several books, including Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984).

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they affect peoples lives. They are not just kind of narrowly academic sorts of topics. And secondly, they are topics where relatively delimited technical issues can actually throw light on bigger questions. To take missile guidance, for example. The thing I focused on is the accuracy of nuclear missiles, and that is an interesting question because it opens up the issue of what people who are building and designing the nuclear missiles think nuclear missiles are for. Because if you think about nuclear missiles as purely deterrents, in other words, things you will only re off if somebody res their missiles at you, then the accuracy doesnt matter very much, because if you re a nuclear missile at London and you miss the center of London by half a mile, it makes very little difference to the kind of amount of death and destruction you cause. If, on the other hand, you want to attack one of your opponents missiles in the concrete and steel silo underneath the ground and miss by half a mile, then with even the hydrogen bomb warhead you wont destroy the missile in its silo. So, from the view of nuclear missiles as deterrents, accuracy doesnt matter very much. From the view of the nuclear missile as something you might want to use rst, then accuracy matters a great deal. So it is a kind of delimited technical question that once you start unraveling it, the question can actually throw light on the overall dynamics of the nuclear arms race, questions of what kind of nuclear strategy were different countries following, those bigger questions. So what I look for, to summarize, is little things, delimited technical questions that are connected to big stuff, things that are important to peoples lives, questions like the overall nature of nuclear arms race or, in the current period, the overall fortunes of the nancial system.
HUANG :

Can you concisely say something about how we can apply the thinking of Strong Programme theory to nancial issues such as credit crunch? I think it is not so much a question of Strong Programme theory per se, because you can give a simpler answer. I mean Strong Programme theory does come into it, but the simpler answer is more straightforward to give, which is that nancial markets, especially nowadays, are not simply market instruments such as stocks or government bonds that are relatively simple and relatively well understood. There are lots of complicated nancial derivatives that are created, and those are often complex products that you can understand only via mathematical modeling. So to study the nancial market from the viewpoint of someone based in science and technology studies, amongst the things you are doing, is looking at the role of knowledge and technical systems in nancial markets now. Knowledge and technical systems are important for all nancial products, but they are particularly interesting things to study when you look at highly complex nancial products, because there you cant understand them, you cant grasp them, you cant treat them without modeling and without technical systems. So in a certain sense the slogan of our eld is to open the black box, in other words, getting inside the contents of technology, and in nancial markets it is a very important thing to do. A crucial part in the creation of the current nancial crisis was two particular black boxes: the asset-backed or mortgage-backed security and the collateralized debt obligation. So you have two complicated products, two products that you typically need to use mathematical modeling to understand, and then the coming together of those two

MACKENZIE :

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products, particularly when one is layered on top of the other. So collateralized debt obligations, where the underlining assets are asset-backed securities, there you have black boxes within black boxes. And they were at the technical core to the current crisis. It is that class of product, the collateral debt obligation based on asset-backed securities or, to repeat, the black box consisting of black boxes.
HUANG :

Another thing which is quite interesting and related to nowadays is about carbon trading. Can you also roughly talk about why it is interesting? Yeah, absolutely. If you think about it, there are various ways in which we could attempt to slow global warming, and I dont think these are mutually exclusive ways. Probably we are going to need all of them. What could we do? We could have direct government rules. We could say if you want to build a coal-red power station, you must have underground carbon dioxide storage associated with it, rather than pumping the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So that is direct government regulation. Or you could encourage people to voluntary action; you could just say to people: Look! Its very important for the planet that you do not take those ights. Or you could provide funding for government research and development activities. Or you could remove the subsidies from the extraction and the use of fossil fuels, because in many cases, quite surprisingly, you nd that countries are in some ways, for practically valid reasons, actually subsidizing it. Or, and this is where carbon trading starts to come in, you could not do direct things, but you could try to manipulate the market mechanism so that it was more environmentally benecial than now. One way of doing that is a carbon tax; the other way of doing it is the construction of a carbon market, and that, for example, has been the route the European Union has taken. Since 2005, all installations within the European Union that have a certain size, for example a thermal input capacity greater than 20 megawatts, have to hold permits, have to hold allowances in order to be able to emit carbon dioxide. So they get these allowances. At the moment, they are largely given those allowances for free, though it may soon be that they will have to buy these allowances. And if they emit more carbon dioxide than they have allowances, then unless they want to get ned, they have to go buy allowances on the market. If, on the other hand, they reduce their emissions, then they have excess allowances and they can make money by selling some of them. So thats the basic idea of the simplest kind of carbon market, which is called the cap-andtrade marketso, a market in which there is an overall cap on emissions and people are allowed to trade within that. Again, it may not sound like the sort of thing that somebody in science and technology studies will necessarily look at, but I think it is in at least a couple of senses. One is the general question of opening black boxes that we just talked about; the other is quite a specic question, which particularly is the case when you move outside the connes of, say, the European Emission Trading Scheme3 in the carbon trade market I just described and then think about, for example, the Clean Development Mechanism,4 which is, as you know, operative within China and many other countries worldwide. One of the issues is that the European Union market covers only carbon

MACKENZIE :

3 4

See the website of EU ETS: ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/emission/index_en.htm. See the website of UNFCCC: cdm.unfccc.int/index.html.

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dioxide, but the Clean Development Mechanism covers all the gases included in the Kyoto Protocol.5 So one of the questions is: how are the two things made the same?6 So a common project, a big stream of income to China, is the high-temperature incineration of HFC-23, which is triuoromethane, emitted from plants in China producing HCFC-22, which is chlorodiuoromethane, which is a very common refrigerant. HFC-23 is the waste gas from the production of the refrigerant. It is a very damaging greenhouse gas. So what people who own chemical plants in China can do is to get funding under the Clean Development Mechanism to destroy the gas by thermal incineration, and it operates by a system whereby they get credits for doing that, which can then be sold on to the European scheme and used in the European scheme in place of European allowances. The question of making things the same is: how do you equate emissions of one gas, carbon dioxide, in one place, Europe, with the destruction of another gas, HFC-23, in a different place, i.e., China? So the question of making things the same here is actually a rather rich, socio-technical kind of question. So that is an example of the kind of question that opens up if you start to approach carbon markets from the point of view of science and technology studies.
HUANG : Can we ask some more theoretical questions such as questions about nitism

and performativity? Can you dene these terms for us and offer an account of how they might function in a sociology of scientic knowledge?
MACKENZIE :

Yeah, absolutely. Finitism rst. Well, the way I think is most easy to think about nitism is as a theory of classication. But lets think about classifying something mundane, like, say, fruit. You know, a piece of fruit, that is an apple, a piece of fruit, that is an orange, another piece of fruit, that is a banana. And any society has a set of classications for fruit. Well, the question is: does that set of classications then determine all future classications of fruit? Now, on certain theories of meaning, yes, it does. So, as it were, the world comes divided up into apples and entities which are not apples. Finitism says: this is a misleading way of thinking about it. Supposing somebody from Africa comes into this room and they put down a strange thing that looks a bit like an orange, a bit like an apple, a bit like a banana, then suddenly we have to make a decision as how to classify that. What nitism insists on is that there is nothing inherent in previous acts of classication, which are always nite in number. This is where nite comes in. Any individual, any culture has only ever performed a nite number of acts of classication, and that nite number of acts of classication does not determine all future acts of classication. It inuences future acts of classication but does not determine them. Now that seems a long way from nancial markets, but where I think its interesting to apply to nancial markets is to apply it to accounting. Think what accountants do. Well, amongst the things accountants do is to classify economic transactions. So this transaction is the creation of an asset; this transaction is incurring an expense; that

See the website of UNFCCC: unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php. See Making things the same at MacKenzies website: www.sps.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_le/0018 /4860/bottom_line.pdf.
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transaction is something different. So it is a bit like to classify pears, apples, and bananas. And those acts of classication are very consequential. So you probably remember the bankruptcy of WorldCom, the American big giant telecom company in 2002, which was a record bankruptcy. The key issue in that was its accountants classifying the cost of leasing lines as acquiring an asset, something that other accountants believe should be classied as incurring an expense. We start thinking about the accounting that can make a very, very big difference to accounts. So that is nitism. The other thing you asked about was performativity. Well, the rst thing to say is what the word performative means. It was coined by the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) to label those utterances that are not descriptions of an external state of affairs that already exists, but utterances which are the actions to which they refer. So if I say this is a pen, we dont normally treat that as a performative utterance, though you can see certain circumstances where it might be. But if I was late to meet with you and I came in and I said I apologize, then that utterance is performative. It doesnt describe any preexisting state of affairs. By saying I apologize, I bring into being the state of affairs to which it refers, which is Austin means by a performative utterance. Now we can get to economics in this context. It is normally the case that people think about economics as something that attempts to describe and analyze an existing external reality which is the economy. In that viewpoint, economics, so to speak, does the same sort of thing as astrophysics does in relation to what is going on in the stars. But economics is, to some extent, different from that, because people in the market themselves draw upon economics. The case I looked at in most detail is the case of options, which are contracts or securities that give a right but not an obligationfor example, the right to purchase one hundred shares at a set price. There is an important and inuential economic theory of options called Black-Scholes model,7 the equation written by economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes. What is interesting about that from the point of view of performativity is that almost as soon as that economics was done, people in options markets started using the Black-Scholes model to guide their economic behavior. How they price options, the trading strategy they follow, the way they hedge the obligation in question and the like. So there you can see the role of economics is potentially rather different from, say, our ordinary notions of astrophysics. Astrophysicists sit and write down equations that, they think, describe the nuclear reactions in the sun. We dont ordinarily think this [process] will have any effect whatsoever on the nuclear reactions in the sun. But if I am an option theorist, writing down an equation to price options, and that does not just remain in my academic paperpeople start using it in options marketsthen, potentially, that starts to have effects on what it is apparently describing. So its starting to move toward the I apologize kind of category. Thats where the notion of performativity, I think, is useful to apply to markets, particularly in relation to economics. The [research] question is: is academic economics having effects on its own objects of study?

See A price is a social thing at www.sps.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_le/0013/3415/arbitrage.pdf.

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HUANG : Your thesis was completed during the heyday of the Science Studies Unit that

current younger scholars see as a golden age of the Edinburgh School. Looking back, do you see any pertinent differences between then and now in terms of the personnel of the Edinburgh School, its outlook, ambitions, practices, and its general place in academic culture?
MACKENZIE :

Intellectually, it has been changed a lot. All sorts of views and perspectives have been developed subsequently, I think. I would say it had a little bit of golden-age characteristic to it. It was a wonderfully exciting time to be a PhD student, for example, because the people around me in the Science Studies Unit were really interesting and excited about what their PhD students were doing, because Barry Barnes and David Bloor had formulated the Strong Programme, which is essentially a methodology for studying the sociology of scientic knowledge. They were very interested and excited by people going out to apply this methodology. I think that was the golden-age aspect of it. I hope it does not happen to any of you, but it can be the case that your supervisor is not very interested in what their PhD students are doing. In a way, what happened is institutionalization. The eld has got bigger. Back when I was a PhD student, between 1972 and 1975, there were not many places in the eld. There were reasonable numbers of history of science departments, but very few people approaching science sociologically, especially sociology of knowledge. Now, of course, the eld is very big; there are many departments in many different countries doing it. Conferences like the 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) attract hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand people. It has become more like an ordinary academic discipline. There is a certain loss of the excitement of newness. The reason I found nance exciting is because it is a new topic for our eld. I have got the excitement of newness again.

HUANG : In Taiwan, people tend to use the umbrella term of Strong Programme/SSK

to understand the gist of the Edinburgh School. Do you think this understanding is meaningful? Or, to put the question in another way, what is the gist of the Edinburgh School?
MACKENZIE :

I think there is a central theoretical thread, which I see in two phases. In both phases, the central gures are Barry Barnes and David Bloor. The rst phase is indeed the phase of Strong Programme sociology of scientic knowledge, Edinburgh School relativism, so to speak. The second phase, I think, of the Edinburgh School is indeed what we were talking about a few minutes ago, which is nitism, where Barnes and Bloor moved on from their earlier formulations into taking the perspective on scientic knowledge, rst clearly formulated in Barry Barness book (1982), T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. Then, I suppose getting to the level almost of a textbook in the joint book by David, Barry, and John [Henry] in 1996, which is Scientic Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996). They were drawing in nitism on authors like Mary Hesse (1974) and Wittgenstein (Bloor 1997), the founding gures of nitist analysis. So it is still sociology of science, particularly sociology of scientic knowledge. But the Strong Programme was, in a certain sense, kind of methodological, so to speak. Finitism, as applied to science, is more substantially theoretical. There is a central core to the Edinburgh School. I would say there were these two developments.

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Can we say that there is a jump from one dimension to a nitist dimension around the 1990s when they [Barnes and Bloor] discovered nitism? A lot of people in China say that there is a jump or gap there. I would say there are certainly two phases. It is not that the Edinburgh School, as it were, abandoned the earlier Strong Programme sociology of scientic knowledge. Because you can see, in a certain sense, nitism as a way of eshing that out. So the two phases are not in opposition to each other, but they are different in their emphases. The nitist face develops out of the Strong Programme department but adds to the Strong Programme. But it is not just a repetition of the Strong Programme.

MACKENZIE :

HUANG :

Given your connections with both Edinburgh and Paris (through Michel Callon), and due to the polemical tone of the debate, we are interested in the engagement between David Bloor and Bruno Latour and their respective views of SSK. Firstly, was the debate really as acrimonious as it appeared to be in print? What, fundamentally, was at stake here? It is a bit of a confusing argument. People sometimes nd it confusing. This, I suppose, is a very biased Edinburgh School answer to the question. What people think of as the Edinburgh School position is actually not, I think, what the position really was. People often think of the Edinburgh School position, as it were, as being sociologically reductionist, so that science, scientic knowledge, is the product of social processes. Much more than the particular debate you are referring to, but more generally in the wider science wars, the big public critique of the sociology of science has really hinged around that sort of issue, where people from outside of the eld say: Look! You people in the sociology of science, you are saying science is just a social construction. I think that a few people within our eld have thought that was what the Edinburgh School was saying. In other words, the Edinburgh School is denying the role of the material world in the construction of scientic knowledge. That was never actually the case. Its quite straightforward to point this out in quotations, even from the very earliest work of Barnes and Bloor. They clearly acknowledged the role of the material world. True, they did not dismiss it at great length. I think that is because they were developing sociology of scientic knowledge; they were focused on that enormously. So you can kind of see where the misunderstanding has come from. But, to a large extent, I see the attacks on the Edinburgh School as being attacks on this misunderstanding of the Edinburgh School.

MACKENZIE :

HUANG : Right, you talked about the attacks from science wars. How about the specic

Bloor and Latour debate?

MACKENZIE : That was sparked by David Bloor in response to various parts of Latours

writings where the Edinburgh or relativist position is deemed sociologically reductionist, and seen as ignoring the role of nonhuman entities and the like. To a signicant extent, I think thats a misunderstanding of the Edinburgh Schools position. You can see precisely the same line of argument, or I would say misunderstanding, for example, in some of Pickerings work.

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HUANG : To talk about debate, I think wed better discuss some of the recent debate on

saving Strong Programme (Kemp 2005). Some people want to save Strong Programme. Should we revive Strong Programme in any way?
MACKENZIE :

To my mind, the Strong Programme is fundamentally methodological; particularly, think about David Bloors four precepts. They are about how scientic knowledge should be studied from a sociological viewpoint. To my mind, when those are properly understoodas I said, there are misunderstandingsI suspect they are relatively uncontentious now in history, sociology, maybe even in philosophy of science. I think they are pretty much descriptive of, for example, what modern historians of science actually do. So I dont think there is any saving to be done. But for sure, in a sense the precepts are laying out what one should do. To my mind, doing something is always more interesting than laying out how something should be done. So it is a question of doing it.

HUANG : Looking back on your own work, can you tell us what has been achieved? For

a newcomer like us, what can we do to further develop your achievements?

MACKENZIE :

I dont think one should go on about ones achievements, because it can easily become an unpleasant form of boasting. I suppose what I like to think is that previous pieces of work I have done have shown how interesting it can be to do what I mentioned earlier in the conversation, which is to take what appears to be a rather delimited technical issue and show how by placing that delimited technical issue in its social, cultural, technical, historical context, you can actually throw light on bigger issues.

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HANG MIAO : I want to ask about policy. What is the role of social scientists in the policy-making process? How can a social scientist get involved in policy decisions? MACKENZIE :

I think it is fair to say that here there is a little bit of a divide in the eld. The classic Edinburgh School position is actually very skeptical about involvement in the policy processes and in drawing policy conclusions from the work thats done. In a sense, I actually share this view and skepticism. If you look at what I have written, you dont actually nd huge numbers of policy recommendations. Certainly, there are policy issues, say, in the area of technological innovation. I think we can say that the work that has been done in that area is helpful. Particularly, here we have Robin Williams. He showed a fair amount of policy thinking in this kind of area is based upon a view of technology innovation that research shows to be simplistic.

HUANG :

Policy is a common issue in Taiwan. Politicians always ask us: so, what do you want? We may answer that we want to open the black box. And they may ask: okay, what is your alternative policy approach, then? Facing this kind of question, what should we say to them? I think it is not just an issue in Taiwan. That is an issue everywhere. People look to all kinds of elds for simple answers. I suppose there is always a balancing act. In a certain sense its a justiable request. On the other hand, if we fall into answering it too easily, then we are likely to not really be following the lessons from our eld, which are typically much more complicated and nuanced and cannot be simply reduced to simple policy lessons.

MACKENZIE :

HUANG : STS as a discipline is booming in East Asia. Could you provide some sugges-

tions for scholars working in these countries? In your opinion, where should these newcomers go?
MACKENZIE : Goodness! I suppose one is this: not to think of the eld too narrowly. In a

certain sense, often I think the most exciting areas in our eld are where people move away from the traditional topics of the eld. Still be familiar with them, the theories and so on, but start to apply them in new areas. Thats, for example, what I nd exciting in the study of nance. This is not a traditional topic for science and technology studies, but perspectives from science and technology studies throw new light on important things going on. I suppose that is one thing I would say: to look out for those kinds of intellectual opportunities.

References
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon. Barnes, Barry (1982). T. S. Kuhn and social science. New York: Columbia University Press. Barnes, Barry, David Bloor, and John Henry (1996). Scientic knowledge: A sociological analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bloor, David (1997). Wittgenstein, rules and institutions. London: Routledge. Ford, Jonathan (2009). Public intellectuals and the nancial crisis. Prospect, 16 December. (http://www .prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/12/public-intellectuals-and-the-nancial-crisis/) Hesse, M. B. (1974). The structure of scientic inference. London: Macmillan. Kemp, Stephen (2005). Saving the Strong Programme? A critique of David Bloors recent work. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 36: 70720.

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MacKenzie, Donald (1981). Statistics in Britain, 18651930: The social construction of scientic knowledge. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. MacKenzie, Donald (1990). Inventing accuracy: A historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacKenzie, Donald (2008). Material markets: How economic agents are constructed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacKenzie, Donald, and Yuval Millo (2003). Constructing a market, performing theory: The historical sociology of a nancial derivatives exchange. American Journal of Sociology 109: 107 45. MacKenzie, Donald, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu (2007). Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.