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Within science and technology studies, few approaches have generated more contention—or more misunderstanding—than the "actor-network" analyses of Callon, Latour, and Law. Although many have taken critical issue with this approach, few studies have engaged the strengths and weaknesses of actor-network theory on its own terms. This article presents two arguments that constitute a critical engagement across (rather than against) actor-network terrain. First, the author suggests that the confusion surrounding actor-network accounts lies partially in the ambiguous role played by "social context" and argues for the political and explanatory importance of resketching the boundaries between the laboratory and society. Second, the author argues that a semiotic perspective is not necessarily an exclusive one and that different ways of telling stories about technoscientific practice can be combined usefully. These arguments are illustrated with a mostly Latourian account of the development of the STR Mark-I, the world's first "fully engineered" nuclear reactor.

Prospects and challenges for a new political sociology of science / Scott Frickel, Kelly Moore -- Contradiction in convergence: universities and industry in the biotechnology field / Daniel Lee Kleinman, Steven P. Vallas -- Commercial imbroglios: propriety science and the contemporary university / Jason Owen-Smith -- Commercial restructuring of collective resources in agrofood systems of innovation / Steven Wolf -- Antiangiogenesis research and the dynamics of scientific fields: historical and institutional perspectives in the sociology of science / David J. Hess -- Nanoscience, green chemistry, and the privileged position of science / Edward J. Woodhouse -- When convention becomes contentious: organizing science activism in genetic toxicology / Scott Frickel -- Changing ecologies: science and environmental politics in agriculture / Christopher R. Henke -- Embodied health movements: responses to a "scientized" world / Rachel Morello-Frosch, ...[et al.] -- Strategies for alternative science / Brian Martin -- Powered by the people: scientific authority in participatory science / Kelly Moore -- Institutionalizing the new politics difference in U.S. biomedical research: thinking across the science/state/society divides / Steven Epstein -- Creating participatory subjects: science, race, and democracy in a genomic age / Jenny Reardon -- On consensus and voting in science: from Asilomar to the National toxicology program / David H. Guston -- Learning to reflect or deflect? U.S. policies and graduate programs' ethics training for life scientists / Laurel Smith-Doerr -- Regulatory shifts, pharmaceutical scripts, and the new consumption junction: configuring high-risk women in an era of chemoprevention / Maren Klawiter

This article draws together disparate research and theorizing on interdisciplinarity. We first describe widespread efforts to promote interdisciplinarity in U.S. universities and critically examine the assumptions underlying these initiatives. Next, we present a cross-sectional view of interdisciplinary communication, knowledge diffusion, research assessment, and interdisciplinary research centers. We then describe research and theories that provide historical perspectives on the disciplinary system, interdiscipline formation, applied and professional fields, and institutional fragmentation. We present original findings on the prevalence of research centers, faculty hiring patterns in hybrid fields, and the diffusion of research across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The review concludes with a critical summary and suggestions for future research.

Introduction: the succession of cities -- Turn, turn, turn: setting cities in motion -- The opposite of sprawl: industrial churning in the urban core -- Home again: residential churning through time -- Why worry? The multiplicity of risk containment -- Conclusion: swimming below the iceberg

This issue of Political power and social theory explores the changes in science associated with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s. The neoliberalization of science has complicated interactions among states, markets, and civil society, often in ways that challenge major assumptions underlying decades of research. The articles collected here break with older Mertonian sociologies of science and constructivist micro-sociologies of scientific knowledge to examine the meso-level problem of the changing institutional contexts of the scientific field as originally identified by Pierre Bourdieu. Papers presented in Part I extend Bourdieús relational approach to the broader set of interactions among scientific, regulatory, industry, and social movement fields. Part II extends Bourdieu's concern with order and the scientific habitus to the changing patterns of scientific practices under neoliberalism. By reconceptualizing the central problem for the social studies of science as the political sociological problem of field and inter-field dynamics, the collected papers chart an important theoretical agenda for future research in the study of science-society relations.

Abstract
This article analyzes the hidden developmental state (HDS) from a cultural perspective, exploring the values and vocabularies of motive among technology experts, managers and government officials involved in state-led innovation. We consider the rollout of smart meters in Washington State, an endeavor primarily funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Mobilizing evidence from 70 key informant interviews, we develop two related arguments. First, despite its 'hiddenness', the ARRA provided cash injections that shifted utility business models and electricity markets from fossil fuels infrastructure and toward renewable technologies by funding projects rather than organizations. The funding structure enabled engineers and managers to bypass conventional industry gatekeepers. Second, this shift was conditioned by a traditional 'business case' discourse, which functioned as a rhetorical lubricant, legitimating risky innovation and disguising individual and organizational values that run against established norms. A concluding discussion highlights the implications for future research.

Abstract The implications of natural resource extraction for local economic development have become the subject of sharply conflicting expectations, with long‐term outcomes predicted to range from regional economic growth and development to "progressive underdevelopment." These differences in longer‐term expectations cannot be satisfactorily resolved through the use of cross‐sectional or short‐term data. In addition, existing theories tend to be stated in universalistic terms that discourage rather than facilitate the examination of differences across cases. These points are illustrated through a case‐study examination of what has been called the first mining boom in the United States, involving lead mines in the Upper Mississippi Valley during the first half of the 19th century. The developmental consequences of this mining boom appear neither to have been as favorable as predicted by the most enthusiastic proponents of extraction nor as negative as those predicted by the harshest critics. Instead, outcomes appear to have reflected intersecting configurations of physical resource characteristics, the organizational form/scale of extractive activities, the historical period in question, and the nature of relationships among competing resource uses and users.