Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams - Softcover

Vertesi, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226829553 ISBN 13: 9780226829555

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2023

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226829553
• ISBN 13: 9780226829555
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354