Principal Investigator Susan Silbey
By substituting systems of audit and surveillance for the relations of trust and collegiality that have built and sustained modern science, contemporary environmental health and safety management systems seek to reconstruct the everyday routines and rituals of scientific practice, remaking them into the elements of a new form of sociality. While surveillance and audit are familiar in business and government, these are foreign to the world of science and the professional lives of scientists where traditions of autonomy and individual responsibility have been so powerful in creating the authority of science. This project explores a confrontation between the authority of law and the authority of science and does so in the very heart of science: in the laboratory, a complex technologically organized workplace.