Affiliation:
1. Department of History, University of New Brunswick, PO Box 4400, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada E3B 5A3; fax: +1 506 453 5068;
Abstract
The analysis of technoscientific regulatory controversies is now an established genre within science studies, with a small but important methodological and meta-literature. That literature has only rarely noted how published accounts of particular controversies inevitably employ narrational strategies, including decisions about emplotment, time-frames, character-motivation, and the use of tropes, to endow these stories with political and epistemological meaning. In an exercise designed to recover these narrational elements and promote narrative consciousness, this paper presents two separate accounts of a single important controversy: Canada's recent regulatory experience with the Monsanto Corporation's recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). The discussion points out the different narrational strategies employed in each account, and analyses how these strategies interact with explicit or theory-based interpretive approaches to determine how the accounts contribute to `public moral argument' about regulatory affairs. It concludes with broader speculations on the advantages that a greater reliance on narrative form has to offer the field of controversy-analysis and science studies in general.
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,General Social Sciences,History
Cited by
12 articles.
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