Shaping Science

Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA's Teams

AvJanet Vertesi

Häftad, Engelska, 2023

256 kr

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Beskrivning

Drawing on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s, Janet Vertesi uncovers how the social organization of a scientific team affects their scientific practices and results.In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system bravely investigating new worlds, their commands were issued from millions of miles away by a very human team. By examining the two teams’ formal structures, decision-making techniques, and informal work practices in the day-to-day process of mission planning, Vertesi shows just how deeply entangled a team’s local organizational context is with the knowledge they produce about other worlds. Using extensive, embedded experiences on two NASA spacecraft teams, this is the first book to apply organizational studies of work to the laboratory environment in order to analyze the production of scientific knowledge itself. Engaging and deeply researched, Shaping Science demonstrates the significant influence that the social organization of a scientific team can have on the practices of that team and the results they yield.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2023-09-05
Mått:152 x 229 x 23 mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:352
Förlag:The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:9780226829555

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Mer om författaren

Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited and digitalSTS.

Recensioner i media

"Vertesi has lifted the curtain for all to see. Embedded with various NASA projects for years, she takes readers into the heart of two of them. . . . [She] does not simply describe the nuts and bolts of how these missions operate. Rather, she draws sweeping conclusions about the very nature of scientific discovery—what gets found—and how it depends on the ways in which scientists collaborate. That has implications for just about any group of researchers in any field. . . . In the end, science from both missions flowed directly from the people involved. No matter how the lakes on Titan shimmer, or what the mineralogy of a particular Martian rock turns out to be, it was the people behind the spacecraft, keyboards and endless tele-conferences that drove what these interplanetary robots discovered. I’m glad to have come to know them even better through this book."

Innehållsförteckning

PrefaceIntroductionPart 1: OrdersChapter 1: The ContextChapter 2: The IntegratorsChapter 3: The ResolutionsChapter 4: The CollectiveChapter 5: The EnvironmentPart 2: OutcomesChapter 6: The ScienceChapter 7: The SpacecraftChapter 8: The DataChapter 9: The PersonalitiesChapter 10: The Iterative LoopConclusionPostscript: Methodological ReflectionsAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Acronym and Technical DictionaryNotesReferencesIndex