College and Research Libraries


The Culture of Print may most readily 
appeal to literary and cultural histori-
ans, philosophers, and sociologists-
those conversant with the revolution in 
thinking about the transmission of texts 
that began in 1958 with the publication 
of Febvre and Martin's L' Apparition du 
livre. Those less familiar with the topic 
might wish first to seek out editor 
Chartier's synthesis and explication of 
its evolution in his "Frenchness in the 
History of the Book: From the History of 
Publishing to the History of Reading," 
delivered as the 1987 Wiggins lecture at 
the American Antiquarian Society and 
published in the Society's Proceedings 97: 
299-329 (1987). 

Chartier's prolific and provocative 
scholarship will soon be encountered even 
more often in the citation indexes-thanks 
to its being made accessible in English by 
translator Lydia G. Cochrane and by 
Princeton University Press in this and in 
Charter's 1987 collection, The Cultural Uses 
of Print in Early Modern France. A well-de-
signed volume, The Culture of Print includes 
the twenty-four plates from the French 
original, although much reduced in size. 
The subtle arguments and linguistic nu-
ances typical of contemporary French 
scholarship suggest that careful scholars 
may wish to consult the original text-
Elizabeth Swaim, Wesleyan University, Mid-
dletown, Connecticut. · 

Theories of Science in Society. Ed. by 
Susan E. Cozzens and Thomas F. . 
Gieryn. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana 
Univ. Pr., 1990. 264p., acid-free, $25 
(ISBN 0-253-31471-2). LC 89-45476. 

There have been a number of recent 
changes in the focus of studies on the 
impact of science on society. The field 
has moved away from an emphasis on 
internal aspects of science, in which 
studies have dealt with the processes of 
research and the relationships among 
scientists. There is also a lessening of 
interest in specialized studies of small 
scientific groups and individual dis-
ciplines. Currently, the field is taking a 
social constructivist turn and looks at 
the methods by which knowledge is 
being produced, leading to an analysis 

Book Reviews 303 

of the social nature of scientific knowl-
edge. 

This collection of essays by a group of 
established scholars in the sociology of 
science deals with a number of theoreti-
cal questions about the role of science in 
society. It is aimed at specialists in the 
sociology of science; at sociologists with 
interests other than science and technol-
ogy; and at readers concerned about the 
interrelationships among science, tech-
nology, society, and government. 

Cozzens, on the faculty at Rensselaer 
Polytechnic Institute, and Gieryn, who 
teaches at Indiana University, had origi-
nally intended that there would be a dis-
cussion of the papers and the development 
of a set of common issues and differences 
in the various theoretical agendas of the 
participants. While this never rna terialized, 
a set of common issues emerges, although 
there are clearly many disagreements in 
approach and in the use of core concepts. 

In their introduction, the editors identify 
and comment on several sets of conver-
gences and divergences in the papers. Al-
though no one has attempted to define 
where science ends and society begins, 
most of the papers reveal a concern with 
the boundaries of science. There are ques-
tions of borders between science and poli-
tics, between pure science and applied 
science, between social science and natural 
science, between good and bad science, 
and between science and its populariza-
tion. Another common theme is the rela-
tionship among power, patronage, and 
autonomy. Several authors discuss the 
"uncheckability" of scientific perfor-
mance, which means that patronage rela-
tionships are sustained by presumptions 
of trust between sponsor and scientist. 
Among the divergent aspects of the sev-
eral papers are questions about the appro-
priate level of abstraction for theories in 
the sociology of science; the place of the 
investigating subject-the author-in in-
quiry into science and technology (invisi-
ble and detached or vocal and involved?); 
the problem of whether to view science as 
structure or action; and, finally, the rela-
tionship between the technical content of 
science and social structure and behavior 
patterns. 



304 College & Research Libraries 

All of the papers are provocative and 
complex. They all require careful read-
ing and presuppose some background in 
sociology and science. Academic and re-
search librarians may be particularly in-
terested in "Ingredients for a Theory of 
Science in Society: 0-rings, Ice Water, 
C-Clamp, Richard Feynman and the 
Press,"a paper by Gieryn and Anne E. 
Figert (Indiana University). This paper 
uses the 1986 Challenger disaster as its 
context. "Scientific Malpractice and the 
Contemporary Politics of Knowledge," 
by Daryl E. Chubin (Office of Technol-
ogy Assessment, United States Con-
gress), covers not only scientific fraud, 
but also "pork barreling" as a means of 
funding scientific research and capital 
construction. 

The essays are well written, and an 
excellent introduction ties them to-
gether. The references that accompany 
each paper together serve as a thorough 
bibliography of current research in the 
sociology of science.-Jay K. Lucker, Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology, Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts. 

Smith, Eldred. The Librarian, the Scholar, 
and the Future of the Research Library. 
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, · 1990. 
119p. $35 (ISBN 0-313-27210-7). LC 
89-25665. 

This essay addresses a wide range of 
concerns of academic research librarians 
in its argument for "a complete, unified 
electronic record of scholarship." Smith 
contends that maintenance of such a re-
cord and its means of access, which he 
calls bibliographic apparatus, will re-
spond both to the scholar's requirements 
of convenience and reliability and to the 
librarian's need to preserve and control. 
He doubts the success of attempts to pro-
mote self-sufficiency on the part of the 
scholar, essentially because those skills 
are not the natural province of scholars; 
he doubts the success of microform as a 
vehicle for preservation, essentially be-
cause it constitutes a regression to a for-
mat that is less controllable than the 
electronic format; and he doubts the suc-
cess of library cooperation, understood 
in its traditional sense, essentially be-

May 1991 

cause it is almost antithetical to some of 
the librarian's driving principles. The 
author devotes several pages of this brief 
book to an interesting analysis of the 
debate about the once-proposed Na-
tional Periodicals Center. 

Smith envisions the successful re-
search library service of the future as 
functioning with a central, complete, 
electronic scholarly record as its nucleus. 
Its major activities will be "gathering, 
organizing, and maintaining the record 
as well as the bibliographic apparatus." 
The clientele of this center will be re-
search librarians from other institutions, 
thereby ensuring a high quality of com-
munication pertinent to maintenance of 
and access to the record and its biblio-
graphic apparatus, while the role of 
these research librarians at local sites 
will be to mediate between local scholars 
and the information structure of the 
scholarly record. 

Smith's book presents a stimulating vi-
sion of how things should and could be at 
some unspecified time in the future. He 
advances his argument with a rigid logic 
that is bolstered, however, by bold state-
ments that are as debatable and unsup-
ported as they are quotable. In discussing 
traditional media of scholarly communi-
cation (books and journals), he claims that 
"electronic copy is now produced for all of 
this material, as part of the printing pro-
cess." Surely, this is not true of Third World 
publication or even of some pockets of 
technologically more advanced nations. 
The book does not incorporate documen-
tary notes, but includes, instead, a con-
cluding "Bibliographic Essay." This un-
conventional practice has the advantage of 
allowing the author to intermingle impres-
sion and fact without notes that might dis-
tract from the tight logic of his argument. 
This practice also has the disadvantage of 
leaving the reader a little insecure, a con-
dition that is aggravated by the fact that 
the "Bibliographic Essay" is not a review 
of the literature on the book's topics in 
general, but, instead, an essay describing 
only sources that support aspects of the 
preceding arguments. These are not minor 
quibbles, for this unconventional style 
may mean that the fruits of Smith's excel-