Model Cases

On Canonical Research Objects and Sites

Monika Krause

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226780979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Model Cases, Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

1

Material Research Objects and Privileged Material Research Objects

An ethnographer spends a day in a particular neighborhood of Boston. He meets two or three informants, follows one around for the afternoon, then goes home to take notes. Drawing on several hundred pages of field notes and several years of research, he will later make an argument about poor people and neighborhood renewal.

A scholar compiles data about the hundred largest metropolitan areas in the United States. The resulting finding is later cited abroad concerning the issues of “segregation” and “cities.”

Another US city has 546,000 inhabitants and has never seen an ethnograph er since its founding.

When a sociologist conducts an ethnography in a specific neighborhood of Boston, this neighborhood is their field site, their observations are captured in their notes, and their interviews are their “data.” When they publish a paper that promises to contribute to the understanding of “slums” or “neighborhood renewal,” the neighborhood studied also becomes a stand-in for the category of “American city,” or “city.”

Of course, our researcher does really want to understand the lived experience in Boston’s West End, New York’s East Harlem, or Chicago’s South Side; but the specific setting also serves partly as a means to an end; it is a stand-in for something else. Using a distinction that can be traced back to Aristotle, we can observe that the neighborhood plays, at least in part, the role of a material research object: the material research object is the material, concrete object accessed through particular traces, produced by specific tools and instruments. It is distinguished from a formal or epistemic research object—the target of inquiry as presented by the researcher, which is necessarily a conceptual entity and depends on specific intellectual and disciplinary traditions.

Scholars in the social studies of science have highlighted that research is a concrete activity, and one that takes place in specific social situations. Beginning from concrete social situations of situated research, they have drawn attention to the complex work involved in the production of “representation,” or “translation.” Moving from situated observations or concrete traces to findings about, say, “the city” involves a series of steps that involve various kinds of practices and media, which we can observe and study. In some basic sense, we can analyze all forms of research—even the most abstracted and even the most textual—with a view to the concrete context of their production, including what the researchers use as stand-ins.

In what follows, I will start from the observation that all research is using stand-ins in some way or another to explore the role that implicit or explicit conventions concerning material research objects and privileged material research objects play in some fields of research.

I will begin by discussing the distinction between material research objects and epistemic research objects, or targets, in more detail. I will then discuss how biologists use model systems as a case of the more general phenomenon of conventions concerning privileged material research objects. Biology is already a prominent reference point for discussions about material research objects; it has an explicit discussion about material research objects and privileged material research objects, so we can learn from these self-observations, as well as the descriptions provided by historians and sociologists of science.

I will then use the case of urban studies and the sociology of work to make it plausible that we can observe similar patterns in the social sciences. As I will discuss, the logic associated with privileged material research objects is only one of several ways to organize attention. We can distinguish this logic from its other, the logic of coverage. It is also often coupled with the logic of application; other logics include the logic of representativeness and of formal models.

Material Research Objects and Epistemic Targets

I make a distinction between two aspects or dimensions of research objects; namely, between the material object of research and the formal object of research, or epistemic target. The material research object is a concrete object, accessed through particular traces, or “data,” that are produced by specific tools and instruments. It stands in for the epistemic target of the study—what a given study aims to understand better, which is not usually available for direct observation. The epistemic target is an object as conceptualized in a particular scholarly tradition. It contains the perspective of the study.

The distinction can be traced back to Aristotle,1 and reoccurs with slightly different terms in different authors.2 The material object of research is also called the “technical research object,” the “object of experience,” or “proxy”; or, in the expression of Robert Merton (to whose account we shall return to in the next chapter in more detail), it is a concrete set of “research materials.”3 My use of the distinction has been influenced by the work of scholars who observe interdisciplinary research and note that scholars in different disciplines tend to study the same material research objects but pursue different epistemic targets in doing so, which can lead to misunderstandings in a working group or team.4

The epistemic target, in the way I use the term, is the target as posited by the researcher; using the term does not require me to defend a claim about the existence of any actual epistemic target “out there.” Most social scientists do not think of their epistemic object as an object in a physical sense, but almost all scholarly contributions have a conceptual target of analysis, the object that any given text is “about,” whether it is described or explained, interpreted or reinterpreted, contextualized or recontextualised. They create a research object when anything is presented as the “what” of study, the target of their inquiry: what they are trying to describe, explain, understand, or study. In that sense, “the eighteenth century,” “the history of the military,” and “Islam” are categories for objects of study, as are “emotionality,” “globalization,” and “capitalism.”

The material research object is constituted by an instrumental relationship to the epistemic target. It stands in for the epistemic target, as the epistemic target is usually not available; indeed, it can only be an epistemic target by not being fully available.5

The distinction is a distinction that is situatively established by researchers themselves in concrete contexts, by establishing a means-end relationship. Research on biologists has highlighted that they engage with this distinction over time, adjusting how they label material and epistemic or categorical aspects of their material as they go along.6 Any specific set of materials can be embedded in a longer list of instrumentalities: a biologist might use a concrete set of fruit flies to understand how fruit flies move or do not move toward the light in order to understand vision in fruit flies, in order to understand the role of specific genes in countering neurodegeneration.7

The situational and processual aspects of how material research objects and epistemic targets are construed has also been discussed in sociology, where scholars have described this as “casing” based on observations of themselves and others.8 When researchers start their research project, it is not always clear what will be a case for what; framings of projects shift over time in this regard, and the chains established can be long. For example, a sociologist might look at particular documents in a particular archive to understand conscription practices, in order to understand gendered ideologies of citizenship.9 The emphasis can change even after publication, when other scholars encounter and interpret earlier studies in the context of new conversations.10

I depart from some contributions in the literature on model systems in the social studies of science by isolating the material research object from the full ensemble of material tools, which Fujimura calls a “standardized package” for the production of findings.11 This has some costs in terms of the situational dimensions of knowledge production, but it has advantages in terms of discussing shared patterns that are somewhere between a concrete standardized package and an overarching “episteme.”12

In some basic sense, we can analyze all forms of research with a view to what they use as stand-ins of the empirical. This includes very abstract and textual forms of research, including those in philosophy and social theory, which use thought experiments13 or examples14 as stand-ins. It includes qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative studies also do not study their epistemic targets directly: they look at abstracted traces of a population that is also a particular population.

Material Research Objects and Privileged Material Research Objects

When a material research object is studied often and used very widely, we can call it a privileged material research objects. I draw a distinction between the material research object and the privileged material research object, initially based on the case of biology. All experimental research in biology uses some specific kind of system or organic material—a specific animal or other organism; only some research uses a system that is widely used and recognized as a model system, such as mice, the fruit fly (Drosophila), or the tobacco mosaic virus. Biologists call the general material research object—the specific organic material used in any given study to investigate more general processes—the “experimental system”15 or “experimental organism.” Biologists call privileged material research objects “model organisms” or “model systems.”16

Biologists have explicit collective conversations about the advantages and disadvantages of different material research objects; the norms that privilege some stand-ins are also quite explicit. In a somewhat sarcastic account, one evolutionary biologist notes:

There are those privileged imperial organisms called model systems, and then there are all the other organisms. There are seven basic model systems of developmental biology: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the mouse Mus musculus, the frog Xenopus laevis, the zebrafish Danio rerio, the chick Gallus gallus, and the mustard Arabidopsis thaliana. For many researchers, having their experimental organism be considered a model system is an important goal. The recognition that one’s organism is a model system provides a platform upon which one can apply for funds, and it assures one of a community of like-minded researchers who have identified problems that the community thinks are important. There has been much lobbying for the status of a model system and the fear is that if your organism is not a recognized model, you will be relegated to the backwaters of research.17

There is at least the perception that funding can be conditional on using the established model system in a specific field, or on developing a new one. The US National Institutes of Health maintains a list of those organisms it recognizes as model organisms, which currently includes thirteen species, such as mouse, rat, zebrafish, fruit fly, nematode, and thale cress.18

Model organisms can be animals; they can also be considerably “smaller” or “larger” than animals: smaller entities such as proteins, viruses, and bacteria can be studied through model systems. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists also form coalitions to coordinate research on “larger entities,” focusing research on particular places as stand-ins for ecosystems—typically relatively undisturbed or pristine ecosystems, such as islands—in order to combine observations from many different studies and gain insights about dynamics in ecosystems in general.19

Privileged material research objects are not confined to biology. I have noted the similarities between model systems in biology and the literary canon,20 and I would suggest that we can understand the literary canon as a set of privileged material research objects. In the history of literature (and art), it has long been accepted that we should read and discuss some authors and some works more than others—though it is of course heavily contested what kind of works are included. The literary canon may have many societal uses and functions, including the education of schoolchildren and, some critics would argue, the reproduction of social inequality. It is also a device with a function within a community of researchers.21 In this particular social context, literary works serve as objects of research, and canonical research objects come to stand in for a larger class of objects.

Mary Poovey has pointed out that the notion of genre is equivalent to ...