Corporate Crime and the Use of Science in the Case of Asbestos: Producing Harm Through Discursive Shields

This article focuses on the normalization of victimization and harms caused by asbestos, a carcinogenic mineral fiber. To understand the role played by science in hiding the wounds and deaths caused by corporations, the article starts presenting the example of Brazil, where scientific discourse of foreign experts with industry ties are influencing regulation. From there, I examine the disputes for truth in six different medical journals through grounded theory. The results show that authors use some strategies to achieve credibility: avoiding to acknowlegde industry funding; constructing a specific meaning for the controversy about asbestos risks; and reflecting about the consequences os research misconducts. The ways of thinking about asbestos riks and harms are migrating through the international division of scientific labor, both to spread harm and to avoid liability of powerful agents.

Investigating the division of scientific labor using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

Contributorship statements were introduced by scholarly journals in the late 1990s to provide more details on the specific contributions made by authors to research papers. After more than a decade of idiosyncratic taxonomies by journals, a partnership between medical journals and standards organizations has led to the establishment, in 2015, of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), which provides a standardized set of 14 research contributions. Using the data from Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals over the 2017–2018 period ( N = 30,054 papers), this paper analyzes how research contributions are divided across research teams, focusing on the association between division of labor and number of authors, and authors’ position and specific contributions. It also assesses whether some contributions are more likely to be performed in conjunction with others and examines how the new taxonomy provides greater insight into the gendered nature of labor division. The paper concludes with a discussion of results with respect to current issues in research evaluation, science policy, and responsible research practices.

N.A. Vitke & School of Human relations

Modern economic science pays considerable attention to the study of labor economics, an integral part of which is the problem of human resources in the production of material goods. The study of this problem has been initiated by the scientific labor management school and Nikolay Vitke. His work and ideas were undeservedly forgotten and they require more attention. The authors’ goal is to draw ones attention to the fact that the concept authorship of human relations, the beginning of the problem development of communication between psychology and management was initiated by domestic scientists. Later, this concept was developed in numerous of works of foreign scientists, who consider the authors of the American psychologist and sociologist E. Mayo. The concept of N.A. Vitke should be taken into account as one of the important, according to the authors, in the development of modern control theories. The study can be the subject of further discussion about the prospects for the development of management theory, the life and personality of N.A. Vitke as well as his colleagues.

“Essential Collaborators”: Locating Middle Eastern Geneticists in the Global Scientific Infrastructure, 1950s–1970s

In the aftermath of World War II, a new international infrastructure based on United Nations agencies took charge of coordinating global biomedical research. Through this infrastructure, European and American geneticists hoped to collect and test blood samples from human populations across the world to understand processes of human heredity and evolution and trace the historical migrations of different groups. They relied heavily on local scientific workers to help them identify and access populations of interest, although they did not always acknowledge the critical role non-Western collaborators played in their studies. Using scientific publications, personal correspondence, and oral histories, I investigate the collaborative relationships between Western scientists, their counterparts in the Middle East, and the human subjects of genetic research. I comparatively examine the experiences of Israeli and Iranian scientists and physicians engaged in genetic anthropology and medical genetics between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, noting how they both applied nationalist historical narratives to their genetic data and struggled to establish the value of their local knowledge and scientific labor. I argue that the Israeli and Iranian experience of transnational scientific collaboration is representative of how Western scientists relegated their collaborators from “developing” regions to a subordinate positionality as collection agents or native informants. Meanwhile, within their own countries, the elite professional identity of Israeli and Iranian scientists granted them the authority to manipulate their research subjects, who often belonged to marginalized minority communities, and to interpret their biology and history within contexts of Jewish and Persian nationalism.

Jungle Island

Tropical stations drew hundreds of U.S. biologists, few of whom would have attempted a rigorous tropical expedition on their own. In the 1920s through 1940s, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in particular became a model tropical forest. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the station’s location on an island nature reserve within the Panama Canal Zone enabled unprecedented control over space and scientific labor. BCI was transformed into a scientific site by the removal of Panamanian settlers and through descriptions of the site as undisturbed and representative of tropical nature. It was maintained for science by the labor of Panamanian workers and through the development of a host of new techniques and technologies for the prolonged observation of tropical life. There, biologists were able to develop practices to monitor and census living tropical organisms as part of a complex, dynamic ecological community. BCI became increasingly accessible and observable—but only in certain ways and only to certain classes of people.

LA FORMACIÓN INICIAL PARA UNA EDUCACIÓN INTEGRAL DESDE LA PERSPECTIVA MARTIANA

La ponencia sintetiza algunas ideas y juicios como resultado de las tareas del Proyecto de Investigación: Educación desde, durante y para la vida, puestas en práctica en la formación inicial relacionadas con la vida y obra de José Martí a partir de una perspectiva integradora donde se destacan sus valoraciones acerca de la formación medioambiental, la temporal y espacial, la filosófica, la científica, la laboral, la artística, la ética y estética, la comunitaria entre otras ideas que se comparten y debaten empleando una metodología que se sustenta en su propio estilo caracterizado por el amor, el diálogo ameno y el optimismo en el que se le imprime un carácter crítico, contextualizado, dialéctico y vivencial a las actividades en función de una educación integral desde, durante y para la vida. PALABRAS CLAVE: educación; vida; formación. ABSTRACT The article summarizes some ideas and judgments as a result of the work of the Research Project: Education since, during and for life, implemented in the initial training related to the life and work of José Martí from a holistic perspective where highlight their judgments about environmental training, temporal and spatial, philosophical, scientific, labor, art, ethics and aesthetics, community and other ideas that are shared and discussed using a methodology which is based on its own style characterized by love, pleasant dialogue and optimism in which you are printing a critical, contextual, dialectical and experiential activities based on a comprehensive education since, during and for life. KEYWORDS: education; life; training.

OPAQUE AND TRANSLUCENT EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCE IN COLLABORATIVE SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE

This paper offers an analytic perspective on epistemic dependence that is grounded in theoretical discussion and field observation at the same time. When in the course of knowledge creation epistemic labor is divided, collaborating scientists come to depend upon one another epistemically. Since instances of epistemic dependence are multifarious in scientific practice, I propose to distinguish between two different forms of epistemic dependence, opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. A scientist is opaquely dependent upon a colleague if she does not possess the expertise necessary to independently carry out, and to profoundly assess, the piece of scientific labor which her colleague is contributing. If the scientist does possess the necessary expertise, I argue, her dependence is translucent. However, the distinction between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence does not exhaust dependence relations in scientific practice, because many dependence relations are neither entirely opaque nor translucent. I will discuss why this is the case, and show how we can make sense of the gray zone between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence.

Nation-State Science: Lappology and Sweden's Ethnoracial Purity

This paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.