IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB436827085

Writing good economics: How texts ‘on the move’ perform the lab and discipline of experimental economics (June 2022)

Asdal, Kristin (Author)
Béatrice Cointe (Author)

Social Studies of Science
Volume: 52
Issue: 3
Pages: 376-398

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221079600

DOI: 10.1177/03063127221079600

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Laboratories Experiments and experimentation Technoscience; science and technology studies Economics Texts Writing Experimental economics 21st century

How is objectivity accomplished in laboratory economic experiments? To address this question, this paper focuses on a modest and mundane thing: the written instructions that guide experimental subjects in the lab. In a material-semiotic perspective, these instructions can be understood as text-devices. We follow text-devices ‘on the move’ from their very writing, through the lab, the review process and out into the journal article. To do so, we analyse ‘text-author ensembles’, which are journal articles together with practice-oriented interviews with their authors. We show that instructions act not simply as texts, but as experimental instruments that also perform the procedure of experimental economics. They draw together the procedural, material and rhetorical dimensions of experimental work in economics, and link the lab setting to collective validation procedures within the discipline of economics. To achieve this, experimental economists rely on qualitative writing skills refined in collective writing and reviewing practices. These text-devices ‘on the move’ alert us not only to the role of writing and writing skills in the production of scientific knowledge, but to the role of texts as material and semiotic objects that can produce facts as well as labs and disciplines, and that are key to the accomplishment of objectivity in experimental economics.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB436827085/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Dumin, Laura Marie; (2010)
Changes in the Use of the Passive Voice over Time: A Historical Look at the “American Journal of Botany” and the Changes in the Use of the Passive Voice from 1914--2008 (/isis/citation/CBB001567194/)

Article María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra; (2019)
Of flesh and bone: Emotional and affective ethnography of forensic anthropology practices amidst an armed conflict (/isis/citation/CBB046116318/)

Article Sjoerd Zwart; (2022)
Engineering Laboratory Experiments – a Typology (/isis/citation/CBB476453019/)

Article Vanessa Heggie; (December 2016)
Higher and colder: The success and failure of boundaries in high altitude and Antarctic research stations (/isis/citation/CBB453806040/)

Article Hsiao-Chun Wu; (2021)
From Practice to Practice: Writing Academic English from/in Taiwan (Essay) (/isis/citation/CBB314898310/)

Article Brandon Boesch; (2018)
Representing in the Student Laboratory (/isis/citation/CBB947401532/)

Book Bruno J. Strasser; (2019)
Collecting Experiments: Making Big Data Biology (/isis/citation/CBB580929859/)

Article Sandra Calkins; (October 2021)
Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab (/isis/citation/CBB094400545/)

Article Christine Winberg; (2021)
The Making of Engineering Technicians: Ontological Formation in Laboratory Practice (/isis/citation/CBB179651316/)

Article Clémence Pinel; (March 2021)
Renting Valuable Assets: Knowledge and Value Production in Academic Science (/isis/citation/CBB574556496/)

Article June Jeon; (December 2019)
Invisibilizing politics: Accepting and legitimating ignorance in environmental sciences (/isis/citation/CBB717880925/)

Article Sebastian Ureta; (January 2021)
Ruination Science: Producing Knowledge from a Toxic World (/isis/citation/CBB500426002/)

Article Joeri Bruyninckx; (September 2017)
Synchronicity: Time, Technicians, Instruments, and Invisible Repair (/isis/citation/CBB976044504/)

Article María Elena Giraldo; Eliana Arancibia Gutiérrez; (2023)
Governance in socio-environmental research: an analysis of multi-stakeholder cooperation mechanisms in two research laboratories in Yucatan, Mexico (/isis/citation/CBB497620424/)

Article Alina Geampana; Manuela Perrotta; (2023)
Predicting Success in the Embryology Lab: The Use of Algorithmic Technologies in Knowledge Production (/isis/citation/CBB717872146/)

Article Reichmann, Werner; (December 2013)
Epistemic participation: How to produce knowledge about the economic future (/isis/citation/CBB580792249/)

Article Dow Schüll, Natusha; Zaloom, Caitlin; (August 2011)
The shortsighted brain: Neuroeconomics and the governance of choice in time (/isis/citation/CBB240640662/)

Article Guus Dix; (April 2019)
Microeconomic forecasting: Constructing commensurable futures of educational reforms (/isis/citation/CBB842460109/)

Article Sandra Calkins; (2023)
Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science (/isis/citation/CBB894050370/)

Article Adam Moe Fejerskov; (September 2017)
The New Technopolitics of Development and the Global South as a Laboratory of Technological Experimentation (/isis/citation/CBB190620676/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}