Millerand, Florence; Ribes, David; Baker, Karen et Bowker, Geoffrey
(2013).
« Making an Issue Out of a Standard: Storytelling Practices in a Scientific Community ».
Science, Technology, and Human Values, 38(1), pp. 7-43.
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Résumé
The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatoryresources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic studyof the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecologicalresearch community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficultiesencountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authorsfollow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individualtroubles in standard implementation into an institutional issue for theecological scientific community. The authors present the ‘‘hands-on’’ socialscience collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supportinginstitutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narrativescan serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings,thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficultiesthat occur in work with data in the sciences.