Talk Tomorrow: The Social Aesthetics of Problem-Selection

Tomorrow - Wednesday, May 29 - I am giving a talk online from 12:30-2pm ET as part the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine's working group on Science, Capitalism, and Knowledge Commodities, which I've helped organize over the past few years with Eun-Joo Ahn, Joshua McGuffie, and Claire Votava. The talk's subject something I have been thinking about for many years: revisiting the classic problem of problem-selection in the history and sociology of science and technology - that is, how scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, and many other kinds of people come to focus on the problems they choose. Specifically, I'll be revisiting problem-selection in light of a more recent literature on social aesthetics, which you can also think of as a sociology of taste and judgment, which has been mostly put forward by sociologist John Levi Martin and folks he’s collaborated with.

Something like a theory of the social aesthetics of problem-selection - and especially how government regulation shapes those aeshetics - is written into the background of my first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, especially in the book’s conclusion. But even then, I was thinking about the social aesthetics of problem-selection in a more general way and I have been doing so ever since. But this is the first time I will be putting those more general thoughts into words. The talk will be high-level and sketchy, but it will be a beginning amongst friends, and I am really looking forward to it.

I paste the abstract for the talk below. To participate in the Zoom call, you need to create an account at the CHSTM website via this link. But once you do so it is all pretty easy and straightforward.

The Social Aesthetics of Problem-Selection in Science and Technology
 
I dedicate this talk to the late historian and philosopher Ann Johnson, who I conversed deeply and imagined doing a collaborative project with about these themes and who I and many others miss dearly. The question of how scientists, engineers, and others choose the topics they do is one that runs throughout the history, sociology, and economics of science and technology, including classic works by Boris Hessen, Robert Merton, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Hughes, and Ann Johnson. In this talk, I want to explore how problem-selection can be brought into a more recent literature on social aesthetics, primarily put forward by the sociologist John Levi Martin. Social aesthetics, which builds on lines of thinking from gestalt psychology, American pragmatism, Russian activity theory, and field theory, particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s book, Distinction, examines how and why objects become attractive or magnetic to individuals. It can also be thought of as a sociology of attention and judgment - including how problems and other social objects are judged to be sexy, hawt, bodacious, and so on. After thinking through the intellectual background and theoretical picture of the social aesthetics of problem-selection, I will, first, turn to examples including technology bubbles, independent inventors, and corporate R&D labs. And, second, I will bring the state in and make explicit a picture more implicit in my book, Moving Violations, about how governments shape fields and attention to problems through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from conferences to funding research, from procurement to technology-forcing regulations. I will end by outlining a project that Ann Johnson and I imagined together: Using the conference proceedings of the Society of Automotive Engineers to examine how technical-problems from “riding comfort” to horsepower wars to catalytic converters to computerization became attractive to the society’s members over time.