"Science as Practice and Culture" explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice the work of doing science and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and on.
Andrew Pickering has invited leading historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to prepare original essays for this volume. The essays range over the physical and biological sciences and mathematics, and are...

This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge.
Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the extraordinary number of factors social, technological, conceptual, and natural that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures,...

An examination, by a diverse field of experts, of Pickering's mangle theory and its applicability (or lack thereof) beyond the limited cases he presented in the seminal book that introduced this theory.

Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines--physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology--to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative...