The Problem of Standardizing Experience

Like other scientific and technical communities, government agencies shape written knowledge through textual practices like accident reports, investigations, and standards. But standards blur the distinctions between expert science and lay understanding. 

Standards are heterogeneous and complex texts that attempt to formulate in writing the accumulated body of scientific and local knowledge about preventing disaster in hazardous worksites. Standards reflect reasonable and practicable solutions to complex technical problems in the workplace. But they are also the outcome of many deliberations about the value of human life and the distribution of risk among affected populations. 

Researchers in the sociology of science have not explicitly identified their work as studies of historical narratives in science, but their accounts of individual laboratories and communities reveal the ways that the material world becomes invisible in the traces and inscriptions that constitute scientific fact (Latour, Woolgar, and Salk, 1986). 

Markley (1993) critiques both the method and the scope of these studies because, he claims, re.searchers have focused on the contested area where science seeks to write out of existence the knowledge claims of competing accounts of representation and reality (p. 19). As a result, sociologists of science have not explored the ways in which scientific discourses are interpenetrated by the very semiotic systems. . . that they appropriate and seek to de-legitimize (p. 18). His work suggests that researchers must investigate the ways that competing representations of reality affect the discourses of science. 

To construct standards, agencies solicit input from many sources scientific chet)ry, local practice, engineering experience, and common-sense knowledge. 

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