STUDYING THE CAREERS OF KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS 233are institutionally constituted no less than perspectives. The purposes of legal actors, in construct-
ing or invoking particular knowledge claims, become subject to investigation as well.
SCIENCE STUDIES
The metaphor of a frame is useful for studying the construction of knowledge claims, but we need
additional tools to study the institutional reception of knowledge claims. For this, we can look to
science studies, which treats the production of scientific knowledge as a social activity. Challeng-
ing the standard view of science—that scientific knowledge is determined by the actual nature of
the physical world and is therefore not amenable to social analysis—science studies takes the
character of scientific knowledge as its province of inquiry.^15 The focus of attention is the way in
which scientific knowledge comes to be produced and accredited.
A mainstay in science studies is the study of fact making and the investigation of successful
scientific theories (see, e.g., Latour and Woolgar 1988; Star 1988; Woolgar 1988). Although
traditional interpreters of the history of science have explained facts and successful theories by
their intrinsic merits, science studies researchers have taken a different approach. They refute the
possibility of a distinction between “internalist” explanations of scientific knowledge, which point
to the natural unfolding of ideas, and “externalist” explanations of knowledge, which point exclu-
sively to societal and political factors. Emphasizing that the success of a knowledge claim is
partially but not exclusively dependent on the logical tenets of the claim itself, science studies
researchers conceptualize successful knowledge claims as institutional artifacts.
The concept of work permits science studies researchers to refuse the internal/external distinc-
tion. We do not usually think of knowledge production as work, but science studies researchers
fruitfully treat scientific fact making and theorizing as forms of work. Like all forms of work, the
work of science involves habits of thought, routines, and encounters with uncertainties. And, like
other forms of work, scientific work is situated within institutional contexts characterized by
networks, status hierarchies, and resource competitions. The concept of work, then, is uniquely
configured to interface with both the dynamics of meaning construction and the dynamics of
institutions. The concept of work has been developed by sociologists, and so it is likely to be a
new thing to many political scientists.
To investigate the work of knowledge production, Susan Leigh Star sums up the methodologi-
cal directives for researchers: “Try to understand the processes of construction and persuasion
entailed in producing any narrative, text, or artifact. Try to understand these processes over a long
period of time.... Understand the language and meanings of your respondents, link them with
institutional patterns and commitments and, as Everett Hughes said, remember that ‘it could have
been otherwise’” (1988, 198). Hughes’s point is central as it helps ward off the tendency to treat
current arrangements as inevitable.
Law professors, like scientists, are involved in claims making, and so Star’s directives are
applicable to the study of knowledge production in academe. The refusal of an internal/external
distinction in science studies is especially applicable to the study of legal knowledge given the
constitutive and porous nature of legal institutions.^16
Star’s directive to understand the language and meanings of respondents is especially worth
noting because it opens the door to a marriage of science studies and frame analysis. Such a
marriage, however, requires an additional concept: an interpretive community. A shared interpre-
tive framework identifies or defines individuals as members of an interpretive community (Fish
1980, 320, 331–35). The operations (thinking, seeing, and reading) of the extending agents who
make up these interpretive communities are similarly enabled and constrained.^17 Interpretive