【英国青年社会学理论家系列之二】laboratory一词的社会学概念史

Guggenheim, Michael. 2012. ‘Laboratizing and De-Laboratizing the World: Changing Sociological Concepts for Places of Knowledge Production’. History of the Human Sciences 25 (1):99–118.

本期是《英国中生代社会学理论家系列》之二，

预告的link

系列之一的link（介绍M. Krause）

Michael Guggenheim是2005年毕业于苏黎世大学，专长是STS、建筑、艺术还有~cook，也发过一些理论研究的论文，都聚焦在他的专长领域。

Guggenheim, M., & Potthast, J. (2012). Symmetrical twins: On the relationship between Actor-Network theory and the sociology of critical capacities. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(2), 157-178.

Guggenheim, M., & Krause, M. (2012). How facts travel: The model systems of sociology. Poetics, 40(2), 101-117.

当芝加哥学派的帕克说“芝加哥是他们调查的实验室”的时候，“实验室”指的是什么？

当实验成为社会学的科学方法之一时，为什么非流的加芬克尔还要说他做的是“破坏性实验”？

当社会学家/经济学家说“89后东欧的转型是经济学的实验室”，这里的“实验室”指的是什么？

（图片来源：http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/guggenheim/）

Michael Guggenheim, 来自Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London，在他的文章中考察了“实验室”，laboratory一词在社会学史中的变迁。

这本期刊，History of the Human Sciences，我一直想读读了解了解，终于开始看了~~

1. 什么是实验室？

M. Guggenheim给出的定义是：

the laboratory as a result of a process to differentiate a controlled inside from an uncontrolled outside

这里涉及到两个维度和一个基础：

A）placelessness: controlled inside/ uncontrolled outside。这是建立了lab - field的区分，前者可以是stable，后者却是unstable。

B）consequence-free research: inconsequential actions/ consequential actions。实验室再玩，对real-world没什么后果

C）a mechanism for generalization：前两者之所以成为可能，是因为有第三者，科学研究的程序/机制，作为保障。

——Labs are mechanisms to control knowledge objects and allow for inconsequential actions, which can even take place outside science, as, for example, in industry.

2. 二战前的美国社会学是怎样用laboratory这个词的？

最早的芝加哥学派在做laboratory时，有两个意思：

（1）为了说明社会学也是科学，捍卫自身的学科正当性

（2）往往要框定指特定的place——这与上面的说的placelessness冲突。

The term laboratory did a twofold job: first, it secured that sociology was a science, by invoking the laboratory as a term that referred to the natural sciences; second, it allowed the framing of a particular place (mostly understood in the topographical sense) to be a legitimate object of inquiry.

比如美国社会学的先驱W. E. B. Du Bois called the institute in Atlanta, which was founded in 1895 and which he had headed since 1897, a ‘sociological laboratory’ (Du Bois, 1903; Wright, 2002). 在他的自传中，有这样说：

Social scientists were . . . still thinking in terms of theory and vast and eternal laws, but I had a concrete group of living beings . . . capable of almost laboratory experiment’ (Du Bois, 1968: 64) 

（2）跑到“田野”field里去。这实在与后来的太冲突。field居然开始要靠lab来理解。

For Moreno, a laboratory was thus simply a place in which to conduct empirical work, and referred neither to placelessness, nor to inconsequential action. 

芝加学派大佬Park便这样说过：

In Chicago, Robert Park claimed that ‘social science has achieved something that approaches in character a laboratory experiment. For the purpose of these experiments the city . . . becomes . . . a device for controlling our observations of social conditions in their relation to human behavior’ (quoted from Gieryn, 2006: 15).

——其意在说明，我们社会学家不是在安乐椅上的！The use of the term laboratory for the field simply indicates that this is a place where empirical research is conducted rather than armchair speculation. 

（3）当然，早期使用lab一词时，对place也有不同意思，比如他们会认为是一个closed的地方（而非controlled）的，像监狱。

2. 二战后的美国社会学：lab-field区分的形成

The methodological texts of the 1950s and the 1960s did not create a rift between lab and field

随着社会学研究方法的规范化，实验法作为研究方法一种获得了地位。因此，不能再像以前那样，只是在比喻或隐喻的角度来理解了。

也因此，社会学家意识到：这一学科不能使用实验法来研究，要反对实验法。如此一来，lab的语义得到了限制。

1940年，Becker就这样说过：

most sociologists know full well that they cannot experiment, that they are not laboratory scientists, and that in the opinion of many competent judges they never will be. (H. Becker, 1940: 44)

也就是说：But exactly because the laboratory became real, it also became more problematic

然而，并不能因此就全盘否定lab的此一用法。在1960年代，定性研究和lab一词还是挺紧密的。

For a brief time, in the early 1960s, laboratory and experiment could still be thought to be compatible with an interest in verstehen (Schutz, 1965).

... laboratory experiments could be used to prove the invariant foundations of social order based on ‘verstehen’. For Garfinkel and Cicourel, laboratory experiments were problematic only if they took common assumptions between experimenter and subject for granted, rather than using experiments to test the foundations of this reciprocal process.

当然，好景不长，定性学者很快就反对这种需要controlled要求的实验，与之拜拜，托交给了社会心理学。

Laboratory experiments were excluded from qualitative sociology and were identified with the new sister discipline social psychology (Good, 2000: 392).

4. 复兴：laboratories as places of doing science

上面主要是都是从第一个维度：controlled inside/ uncontrolled outside，但这儿不同，更看重了placelessness的变异。

现在，社会学中使用lab.一词，有了四种新的倾向：

(1) lab as collaboration;

——这是由Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff等人类学家，出于对现行的人类学大社群不满，自己搞的小组织、小圈子，他们称之为一种“实验室”——他们以默顿式科学气质来重新要求自己，有一套新的规范使自己与外部的学术社群区分。所以说是：the local control of disciplinary norms

(2) empirical extension of lab space (society as laboratory/real-world experiments);

——这是一种以诊断、预判式的看法，多出现在对气候变迁的社会学研究中。他们认为这个真实世界本身就是个实验室。代表人物是Krohn and Weyer。

(3) lab as a generalized notion for spaces for knowledge production: the locatory;

——作者非常有趣，在这里终于提出了自己的概念，叫Locatory，用来指 “没有实验室的白老鼠”的情况。像Eyal, Bockman等社会学研究社会转型时、像经济学家研究东欧在苏联解体后的变迁。认为 这个真实世界中的自然行为，为他们的理论提供了自然的环境、自然的检验。因此，东欧是白老鼠，甚至都不需要实验室来control。

(4) lab as a container to test objects: the unilatory.

作者说这种情况是lab without rat——有了实验室，却没白老鼠了。

这尤其反映在政策取向的研究，像智库、城市规划、孵化器。他们在孵化企业、城市、政策实验的时候，提供了一个空间，但实际上处于孵化器之中的ngo等并没有和外面脱离关系。

最后， Guggenheim认为，社会学在使用lab.一词中，从最初的作为metaphor，到中途的作为real，到现在，结果又变成了metaphor。

 （Sociological理论大缸第153期）

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