Three Cultural Boundaries of Science, Institutions, and Public Policy:

A Theory of Co-production

Brendon Swedlow

Department of Political Science

Northern Illinois University

Mark Zachary Taylor

Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

Georgia Institute of Technology

Paper prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association annual

meeting, August 30-September 2, 2012, New Orleans, Louisiana. Comments welcome

but please do not quote or cite without permission.

 Three Cultural Boundaries of Science, Institutions, and Public Policy:

A Theory of Co-production

Abstract

In Cultural Boundaries of Science (1999), Thomas Gieryn provides many examples of

the ways in which the boundaries among science, institutions, and public policy are

culturally constructed. But, because he uses a thickly described atheoretical account of

culture, Gieryn is not able to identify different kinds of cultural boundaries of science nor

can he explain why these boundaries are constructed when and where they are. This

paper uses Sheila Jasanoffs concept of co-production and Mary Douglass cultural

theory to identify four recurring states of knowledge, specifying political cultural

conditions for the co-production of science, institutions, and public policy and the co-

production of scientific, cultural, institutional, and policy change. Then, re-casting

Douglass cultural theory as a theory involving three critical social and institutional

boundaries demarcating collectives, divisions within hierarchical organizations, and the

personal space of individuals this paper shows how members of political subcultures

use pollution and purity claims to align themselves and the domain of science with

scientists whose constructs of nature are functional for their preferred social and

institutional relations, while excluding scientists from subcultures and from the domain of

science whose constructs are not functional for those relations. The plausibility of this

theory is illustrated with examples from the cultural co-production of the boundaries of

science surrounding forest and wildlife science and management in the Pacific

Northwest.

2
Introduction

In Cultural Boundaries of Science (1999), Thomas Gieryn provides many

examples of the ways in which the boundaries among science, institutions, and public

policy are culturally constructed. But, because he relies on the same thickly described

atheoretical account of culture as do most others studying science (see, e.g., Cetina, 1994,

1999; Jasanoff, 2004, 2005), Gieryn does not provide a theory of how or why these

boundaries are constructed when and where they are. This paper uses Sheila Jasanoffs

(2004) concept of co-production and Mary Douglass cultural theory (as further

developed in Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990; and Schwarz and Thompson 1990)

to identify four recurring states of knowledge, specifying political cultural conditions for

the co-production of science, institutions, and public policy and the co-production of

scientific, cultural, institutional, and policy change (Swedlow 2012). Then, re-casting

Douglass cultural theory as a theory involving three critical social and institutional

boundaries demarcating collectives, divisions within hierarchical organizations, and the

personal space of individuals to predict how and why scientists and non-scientists use

boundary-work, including pollution and purity claims (Swedlow, 2007), to align

themselves and the domain of authoritative science with scientists whose constructs of

nature and public policy are functional for their preferred social and institutional

relations, while excluding scientists from subcultures and from the domain of

authoritative science whose constructs and policies are not functional for these relations.

The plausibility of this theory is illustrated with examples from the cultural co-production

of the boundaries of science surrounding forest and wildlife science and management in

the Pacific Northwest.

3
 Renewed efforts to conceptualize the relationship between science and society

(Cozzens and Gieryn 1990; Shapin 1992) and science and politics have attained their

most developed and fertile expression in States of Knowledge (2004), edited by Sheila

Jasanoff. She and her contributors argue that science and social and political orderings

co-produce each other. That is, science, society, culture, and politics constitute and

influence each other simultaneously. While applications of the concept of co-production

(Jasanoff and Wynne 1998; Miller and Edwards 2001; Reardon 2001; Jasanoff, 2004;

Martello 2004; Tuinstra, Hordijk, and Kroeze 2006; Tuinstra 2008; and Kemp and

Rotmans 2009) show its promise, they also show its limitations. Namely, as Jasanoff and

others recognize, a theory of co-production is needed to give the concept greater

explanatory and predictive power.

This article argues that the cultural theory developed by Mary Douglas and others

(Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Schwarz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and

Wildavsky 1990) may help science studies scholars develop a theory of the co-production

of science and social order, a possibility that Jasanoff appears to anticipate (Jasanoff and

Wynne 1998). Douglass cultural theory derives four political cultural types from two

dimensions of social relations and specifies some of the political values and beliefs about

human and physical nature that may be associated with particular patterns of social

relations or social order. In cultural theory, these four packages of values, beliefs, and

relations are called hierarchical, egalitarian, individualistic, and fatalistic political

cultures. Since scientists are centrally involved in constructing beliefs about the physical

environment in modern societies, and cultural theory claims that these beliefs are co-

produced with functionally related political values, beliefs about human nature, and

4
patterns of social relations (which scientists often also contribute to constructing, as

Jasanoff and her colleagues show), Douglass cultural theory would appear to get a

purchase on some major constituents of co-productive processes.

Moreover, Douglass cultural theory is not just a theory of how patterns of social

order in political cultures are constructed, but, as developed by others, is a theory of how

change in social orders occurs when beliefs about human and physical nature that are

associated with a political culture are challenged by successful deconstruction of those

beliefs. Thus, Douglass cultural theory potentially offers a dynamic theory of how the

co-production of science and social order occurs.

In cultural theory, culture and institutions are not seen as competing concepts or

mutually exclusive explanations (Chai 1997; Grendstad and Selle 1995; Lockhart 1999).

Rather, institutions are seen as manifestations of social and political relations or orders,

which are one aspect of political culture. The other aspect is cultural bias, or political

values and beliefs about human nature, the environment, and economics, among other

things. Cultural bias is similar to ideology in some respects but not in others (Gastil et al.

2011; Michaud, Carlisle, and Smith 2009; Song et al. 2011; Swedlow 2002b, 2008;

Swedlow and Wyckoff 2009). Thus, cultural theorists do not distinguish culture from

institutions but rather distinguish cultural bias from institutions, while also hypothesizing

that cultural bias and institutions come in distinct packages of values, beliefs, and

relations called political cultures.

Cultural theory contributes to institutional accounts of politics by specifying the

types of institutions that can exist as well as some conditions that can lead to institutional

change. Relations are structured differently in hierarchical, egalitarian, individualistic,

5
and fatalistic institutions. Hierarchical and egalitarian institutions have strong external

group boundaries, but hierarchical collectives are also strongly demarcated internally,

usually from top to bottom, whereas egalitarian institutions typically strive to avoid

internal differentiation, especially hierarchical stratification. Individualistic and fatalistic

institutions, meanwhile, do not rely on organizational boundaries. Individualistic

institutions, such as free markets and protections of civil liberties, however, emphasize

strong boundaries around individuals. This emphasis on strong individual boundaries

may manifest as conceptualizing individuals as rights-bearing entities who can defend

freedom of choice and their property and bodily integrity. Individuals in fatalistic

institutions can defend neither collective boundaries nor personal ones; their choices are

made by others and their lives are subject to forces beyond their control.

Cultural theory also specifies the kinds of policy processes that different political

actors consider to be most legitimate and the political values and beliefs that these actors

seek to transform into public policy. In other words, cultural theory specifies the contents

of four means-ends pairings that should be at the heart of political conflict and coalition

over public policy.

This paper provides a brief overview of the co-production and transformation of

forest and wildlife science and management by scientists, environmentalists, and judges

concerned about spotted owls and their associated old growth forest ecosystems in the

Pacific Northwest. Then, it briefly describes the concept of co-production as developed

by Jasanoff and her colleagues and presents Douglass cultural theory, with a particular

emphasis on the constructs of nature and policy associated with the four cultures. The

plausibility of this theory is suggested by showing how scientists involved in struggles

6
over land and wildlife management in the Pacific Northwest championed cultural

constructs and policies. The paper next presents the cultural theory of change, wherein

new scientific claims about nature become catalysts for cultural and policy change. The

plausibility of this theory of change is illustrated by analyzing the role forest and owl

scientists, environmental lawyers, and Ninth Circuit federal judges played in dramatically

altering land and wildlife management policy while co-producing new identities,

institutions, discourses, and representations in the Pacific Northwest, as Jasanoff predicts.

Finally, the paper suggests how cultural theory can be re-cast as a theory of the co-

production of boundaries relying on purity and pollution claims, providing several

examples of how these claims operated in this case. The conclusion outlines ways further

to test and develop Douglass cultural theory as a theory specifying the political cultural

conditions for the co-production of three cultural boundaries of science, institutions, and

public policy.

The research reported here is based on interviews with approximately 60

participants in and observers of the co-productive boundary-work processes described in

this study, most of whom were scientists, as well as on archival research and secondary

sources. Unless otherwise indicated, all reports on or quotes from research subjects are

taken from tape-recorded, in-person or phone interviews, or email or regular

correspondence in the period 1995-2001. If research subjects are identified by name, it is

because they gave permission to use their names or because quotes come from publicly

available sources. Otherwise, respondents were promised confidentiality, and so are not

identified by name.

7
Scientists, Judges, and Spotted Owls: Policymakers in the Pacific Northwest

Federal land management agencies in the Pacific Northwest that until the late

1980s were engaged primarily in timber production are now overwhelmingly concerned

with ecosystem management. The US Forest Service, which manages most of the federal

lands in the region, had been an exemplary hierarchically organized federal agency since

its founding in the early 1900s, so much so that in World War II it was held up to the US

military as an example to emulate (Kaufman 1960). It championed scientific management

to produce a sustained yield of timber, managing forests much as one would manage any

other crop. The Service called for the harvest of old-growth forests not set aside as

Wilderness Areas or National Parks because it wanted to replace these slower-growing,

decadent, diseased biological deserts with faster growing, healthier, younger stands that

would provide more and better quality lumber (Yaffee 1994, 3-8, 256-82).

As will be discussed in this paper, research beginning in the early 1970s

challenged the Forest Services view that old-growth forests were lifeless cellulose

cemeteries that needed to be harvested. Researchers at the H.J. Andrews Experimental

Forest in Oregon found that these older forests were home to a wide variety of

interdependent life forms. Environmental groups were excited by this research because it

gave them a further reason to value and preserve older forests. Research specifically on

the relationship between the Northern Spotted Owl and old-growth forests became a

particular focus of these groups because threatened species were protected by various

environmental laws passed in the early and mid 1970s.

In other words, research on old growth forest ecosystems and specifically on the

relationship between spotted owls and old-growth constructed nature in ways that were

8
functional for egalitarian environmental groups. The development of this research and

environmental groups interest in this research thus are one significant area where

political cultural conditions were ripe for the co-production of three cultural boundaries

of science, institutions, and public policy (see, generally, Yaffee 1994; Chase 1995; and

Luoma 1999).

Accordingly, in 1987, as will also be discussed in this paper, a public interest law

firm, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF), began suing the federal land and

wildlife management agencies on behalf of the Northern Spotted Owl. The SCLDF

argued and federal judges agreed that federal land and wildlife managers were not doing

enough to protect the owl, violating several environmental laws. One federal judge went

further than this, however, reading these laws to require management of biological

communities or ecosystems rather than individual species. Federal judges enjoined

further timber sales pending the protection of ecosystems, frequently relying on the

testimony and affidavits of federal and university scientists, and adopting their egalitarian

constructs of nature, while largely ignoring scientists affiliated with the timber industry

(Sher 1993; Swedlow 2002a, 2003, 2007, 2009).

Shortly after his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton appointed a scientific

advisory committee of nearly 700 scientists and other experts to advise him on how to

respond to court orders to manage ecosystems. Scientists affiliated with the timber

industry were largely excluded from this effort. In 1993, on the advice of his Forest

Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT), President Clinton placed more

than 24 million acres of federal lands in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California

under ecosystem management, seeking to protect old growth forests and over 1000

9
species associated with them. This policy shift also reduced federal timber sales by more

than 75 percent, adversely affected about 300 rural communities, and effectively

institutionalized an egalitarian construct of nature for an area nearly six times the size of

Connecticut (Yaffee 1984; Chase 1995; Swedlow 2002a).

The spotted owl cases thus resulted in a transformation of federal land and

wildlife management in an egalitarian direction. In particular, the judicial injunctions of

federal timber sales reflected the egalitarian view of nature as fragile, while court orders

to manage biological communities, and President Clintons plan to manage ecosystems,

can be understood as attempts to institutionalize the policies and social and political

relationships preferred by egalitarians. These scientific, institutional, and policy changes

were co-produced by scientists, judges, and environmentalists seeking to protect the

spotted owl and associated old growth forest ecosystems.

The Concept of Culture, the Social Study of Science, and the Need for Theory

Culture is a concept most at home in anthropology, and indeed it is through the

ethnographic study of scientists working in their laboratories that culture has shown its

utility in social studies of science. As sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina observes,

laboratory studies are studies of unfinished knowledge, "knowledge that is yet in the

process of being constituted" by scientists, "one of the most powerful and esoteric tribes

in the modern world (1994, 141). Cultural constructions of nature, in these studies, are

the result of local scientific practices, centered in the laboratory. Indeed, Cetina titled her

review of this research "Laboratory Studies: The Cultural Approach to the Study of

Science," implying that laboratory studies were exhaustive of cultural approaches (Ibid,

140, emphasis added).

10
 Were this so, it would be unfortunate, because laboratory studies would then share

the limitations of culture as it is conceptualized by most anthropologists. Like

ethnographic studies of other tribes, laboratory studies of scientists are mostly (thickly)

descriptive, mostly localized, rarely comparative, rarely theoretically driven. Cetina

suggests that laboratory studies need to be done on a comparative basis, for the few

comparative studies that exist indicate that scientific constructions take place "within

epistemic (and national) cultures (Ibid, 158). Concepts developed for analysis of

individual laboratories are rarely generalizable across these cultures.

The concept of epistemic culture, as defined by Cetina, refers to the aggregate

patterns and dynamics that are on display in expert practice and that vary in different

settings of expertise (Cetina 1999, 8) and to the symbols and meaning associated with

these varying patterns and dynamics of practice (10; citing Geertz 1973, 89). In her

comparative study of the construction of machineries of knowledge construction,

Cetina finds that high energy physics labs have communitarian patterns, dynamics, and

associated symbols and meanings of practice, while microbiology labs display

individuating, individualistic ones (for a summary of contrasts, see pp. 234-240).

Members of high energy physics labs cooperate with each other and other labs to

advance their research, while members of microbiology labs do not. High energy physics

labs work through collective frameworks built on communitarian principles rather than

the logic of exchange (236). [E]verything everybody does is shared participants use

each others results continually, and they combine them in common products and goals

(234). In the molecular biology laboratories studied, the opposite scenario dominated

daily work. Researchers, structurally set up in individuated units, could survive, everyone

11
thought, only as individuated units (236). But the things that unite individual

unitstend also to be the things that divide that create tension, conflicts, resistance,

and feelings of exploitation (234).

Epistemic communities extend beyond the epistemic cultures of scientific

laboratories, but arguably have their own epistemic cultures that, in Peter M. Haass

(1990) formulation, are given explicit political and policy relevance:

An epistemic community is a professional group that believes in the same cause-

and-effect relationships, truth tests to assess them, and shares common values. As

well as sharing an acceptance of a common body of facts, its members share a

common interpretive framework, or consensual knowledge, from which they

convert such facts, or observations, to policy-relevant conclusions. They identify

problems in the same manner and process information similarly. They also share a

common vocabulary, common political objectives to which such policies should

be addressed, and a common network in which findings are exchanged and shared

concerns formulated (55).

Haas does not try to specify types of epistemic communities or types of epistemic

cultures, but contrasts epistemic communities with realist/neorealist and historical

materialist explanations of Mediterranean cooperation for pollution control (64, Table

2.1).

Sociologist Andrew Jamison is among those who seek refuge from the

particularism of laboratory studies in the study of national influences on science (1987,

144-58). He isolates national biases, interests, and institutions as components for

comparison of national influences on science, with biases linked to or influencing

12
interests, and vice versa, via institutions (Brickman, Jasanoff, Iglen 1985).1 Yet the

problems particularism creates for comparative analysis of cultural influences on science

are not entirely solved by making national biases, interests, and institutions the

"components" of comparison. Rather, particularism is displaced from laboratories to

nations. While having gained points of comparison, we are still left with American

science vs. British science vs. French science vs. German science vs. Swedish science vs.

Danish science vs. Japanese science. One has to wonder if this is this any better than

trying to compare Joe's lab to Bill's lab to Mary's lab.

[update with material from Jasanoff, Designs on Nature 2005, 17-29, which

describes problems with national styles of regulation approaches and the need to re-

introduce political culture as an analytical and explanatory concept]

The challenge for those suffering from what Jamison calls his "comparative

ambition" is to find a way to characterize specific, concrete social organizations in more

general, abstract terms, so that the terms will have equal purchase on disparate social

organizations. In other words, the challenge is to find concepts that travel well, while

avoiding excessive conceptual stretching (Collier and Mahon 1993; Sartori 1970, 1983).

Those interested in studying societal influences on science (and scientists influence on

society) need to direct their attention not to laboratories or nations or even science itself,

but to the types of social organization of which laboratories, nations, and science are

specific, historically contingent expressions. Because Douglass cultural theory provides

a typology of social organization, it promises to be very helpful in studying and

comparing the activities of scientific tribes (and their interaction with other societal

organizations) dispersed in time and space (see also Swedlow 2006b).2

13
Gieryns Cultural Boundaries of Science

In Cultural Boundaries of Science (1999), Gieryn argues that science has no

enduring, essential characteristics, but that what science is at any given time and place

varies with culture. In other words, the boundaries that define the domain of science are

historically and culturally contingent constructs. Science is demarcated by cultural

cartographers on a map of cultural space, distinguishing science from non-science

including cultural practices like politics, religion, and sports at that time and place.

What science is and is not, then, is nothing more nor less than what cultural cartographers

say it is and enact it to be and others accept it to be or cannot resist it being in a given

historical context (see also Taylor 1991, 1996).

Relying on David Takacss The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise

(1996), Gieryn provides a contemporary example of how cultural cartography works that

also provides a nice set-up for the case-study of wildlife and forest management that

informs the analysis of this article:

[C]onservation biologists convinced that declining biodiversity imperils human

existence will either have their claims dismissed as wails from a politicized and

misdirected Cassandra or see them translated from fact into environmental policy

depending upon where they and their claims are positioned in the culturescape

by legislators, the press, corporate executives, foundation officials, social

movement organizers, and citizens. Evidence, models, and theories are not

sufficient for these biologists to move policy and save the earth: a cartographic

case for the credibility and reliability of these claims must also be put forth to

persuade audiences that our nature (but not theirs) is the way it is really

14
 Losers see their claims moved out from fact to illusion, lie, ulterior motive, or

faith while they (and their methods, practices, organizations, and institutions) get

marginalized or excluded fully from the domain of epistemic authority reserved

for science and its genuinely licensed practitioners (Gieryn, 1999, 13-14).3

These cultural maps [demarcating science from pseudo- and non-science] are

contextually tailored selections from a long menu [of possible attributes of science],

Gieryn observes, where context is defined by the players and stakeholders, their goals

and interests, and the arena in which they operate (21). With respect to the players and

stakeholders, Gieryn notes that The skin and innards of science will vary depending on

who draws the map and against whom, and for whom (21). Meanwhile, the borders

and territories of science will be drawn to pursue immediate goals and interests of

cultural cartographers, and to appeal to the goals and interests of audiences and

stakeholders (23). Finally, Gieryn notes that Cultural cartography takes place in a

variety of institutional or organizational settings, and the declared contents of science

may also be affected by the peculiarities of each of these arenas (24).

There are no fixed or general determinants of persuasive cultural cartography

in part because people have to figure out not only which science and scientists to trust but

do so by deciding which cultural cartographers to trust and, Gieryn implies, there are no

fixed or general determinants to this process of second-order boundary-work either

(17-18). The problem is not that there is that there is no real science behind the

cartographic representations, but that there are too many real sciences Selections

from this [multiplicity of] real science must be made by cultural cartographers, and they

are strategically (19). In the end, consequently, One must look to the contingencies of

15
each local and episodic contest for credibility in order to find out what science becomes

then and there (21).

On one view, then, Gieryn does not attempt to provide a typology, much less a

theory, of the cultural contexts of cultural cartography of science, nor of the kinds of

players and stakeholders, goals and interests, or arenas in which they operate.4 To the

contrary, he repeatedly implies that creating such a theory is impossible. At the same

time, however, Gieryn appears to embrace the possibility of theorizing about the cultural

cartography of science. First off, it bears noting that in implying that it is impossible to

theorize about the cultural cartography of science Gieryn is offering a rather robust

generalization and an implicit theory of how cultural cartography occurs. His theory

appears to be that cultural cartography is a fluid, episodic, localized, and highly culturally

and historically contingent process. Moreover, Gieryn acknowledges that he is going

considerably beyond his data. The five episodes taken together leave yawning gaps in

sociological understanding of the shifting cultural spaces for science My tiny sample is

not designed to be representative of any universe of social phenomena (34). This

further suggests that his conclusions are more in the nature of theories or hypotheses than

empirically validated generalizations. And, importantly for this study, he notes that

None of these cases takes place in an arena where boundary-work involving science has

become acute just now: the courts (34).

In Theories of Science in Society (Cozzens and Gieryn 1990), Gieryn

acknowledges that compared to others his contribution (Gieryn and Figert 1990) yield[s]

most willingly to the idiographic impulse (Cozzens and Gieryn 1990, 8), but he and his

co-editor note that

16
 Sociologistshave never given up their search for the general laws of social life.

Such transhistorical, transcontextual patterns deterministic relations of a more

or less necessary kind that hold for all instances of a designated set are the

source of predictive explanatory power. How can we ever be as good as physicists

if we cannot anticipate tomorrow with some accuracy (7)?

Gieryn argues that sociologists of science should move away from the study of laboratory

cultures to investigate the "cultural maps" used by non-scientists to construe the activities

of scientists, and, very importantly for this study, he thinks Mary Douglass cultural

theory may be useful in this endeavor.

If science studies has now convinced everybody that scientific facts are only

contingently credible and claims about nature are only as good as their local

performance, the task remains to demonstrate the similarly constructed character

of the cultural categories that people in society use to interpret and evaluate those

facts and claims (Gieryn, 440).5

As Gieryn acknowledges, his search for "interpretive cultural categories" that allow

"multiple and variable accountings" of scientific "facts and claims," and his desire to

discover the relationship between these "cultural maps" and the constitution of authority,

might productively be guided by Douglass cultural theory (Ibid: 416-17).

Toward a Cultural Theory of the Co-production of Science and Social Order

Co-production, Sheila Jasanoff (2004, 2) tells us, is shorthand for the

proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and

society) are inseparable from the ways we choose to live in it. Accordingly, in States of

Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order (2004), she argues that we

17
gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced

together (2). She particularly emphasizes the importance of politics in co-production;

several of her volume contributors explore how knowledge-making is incorporated into

practices of state-making, or of governance more broadly, and, in reverse, how practices

of governance influence the making and use of knowledge (3).

Jasanoff thinks that the most significant contribution of the co-productionist

analytical lens is its descriptive richness, which derives from providing fuller, deeper

accounts of how particular configurations of science and social and political order are

braided together (2004, 42, 276). Jasanoff and many of her contributors situate the

concept of co-production as a stepping stone toward theory development and the ability

to predict (3). While [i]ts aim is not to provide deterministic causal explanations of the

ways in which science and technology influence society, or vice-versa (38), the concept

may help identify deep cultural regularities (42, 280) that allow such explanations and

predictions.

This paper argues that Douglass cultural theory, as further developed by others,

is a good candidate for characterizing deep cultural regularities that may help explain and

predict co-production. Douglass four political cultural ideal types, also called ways of

life (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990), can help specify four recurring ways in

which we know and represent the world, both natural and social, which are inseparable

from, because functionally related to, four possible ways we [can] choose to live in it

(Jasanoff 2004, 2). Notably, the social relations of the four ways of life specified by

cultural theory are simultaneously specifications of four ways of making decisions,

18
constituting authority, and exercising power core concepts and concerns among those

who study and engage in politics.

Douglasian cultural theorists hypothesize that different types of social and

political relations will be accompanied by beliefs and values, including beliefs about

human and physical nature, that allow people to justify these relationships to each other.

In other words, different kinds of social and political relations, beliefs, and values are

thought to be interdependent or functionally related. This interdependence and functional

interrelationship suggests a co-productive process. The corollary of this hypothesis is that

these different kinds of relations, beliefs, and values cannot be mixed and matched. To

live one way and think another is unsustainable, a pathway for cultural change. Changes

in beliefs and values are expected to lead to changes in relations, and visa versa. Thus,

relations constrain beliefs and values, and beliefs and values constrain relations.

Compatible co-productions of relations, beliefs, and values are what Douglas and others

call cultures, and beliefs and values taken together are what they call cultural biases

or ideologies (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky1990; Swedlow 2001, 2002b, 2008, 2009).

Douglas and colleagues next move is more controversial, as it involves an

attempt to characterize these cultural packages in a way that is parsimonious and still

exhaustive of the possibilities at a particular level of abstraction. Like many social

scientists, they think that much of the variation in social and political relations is captured

by the extent of individual autonomy and collectivism in those relations. 6 But unlike

other social scientists, they think that these conditions are independent of each other

rather than inversely related. Instead of lying on opposite ends of the same continuum,

individual autonomy and collectivism vary separately on their own dimensions. More of

19
one does not necessarily mean less of the other. These dimensions and the resulting

patterns of social relations are depicted in Figure 1.

This conceptual shift allows analysts to account for four rather than two patterns

of social and political relations. People in individualistic and fatalistic relations are not

part of a collective undertaking, but individualists retain their autonomy, while fatalists

do not. People in egalitarian and hierarchical relations, meanwhile, are part of a

collective undertaking, but egalitarians retain much more of their autonomy than

hierarchs.

Hierarchical relations are highly structured, with everyone and everything having

his, her, and its place, represented by an organizational pyramid in Figure 1. In this

cultural environment, legitimate decisions are made by persons with the proper authority

to make particular types of decisions. In other words, the decision rule is that the proper

authority decides.7 Individualistic relations, by contrast, are highly fluid, and subject to

individual choice, represented by a network in Figure 1, where I decide. Fatalistic

relations, meanwhile, are tenuous and unreliable, driven by the "whim and caprice" of

others, represented by atomized individuals in Figure 1, where others decide. Finally,

people in egalitarian relations retain their autonomy by giving everyone an equal voice in

(and thus the power to veto) collective decisions. Here,we decide. The egalitarian

desire to have it all is represented here by something that looks like a chocolate chip

cookie in Figure 1.

Figure 1

[about here]

Each of these four patterns of social and political relations is hypothesized to be

20
justified by and in turn justify (and make plausible) particular kinds of beliefs and values.

Perhaps not surprisingly, cultural theorists hypothesize that individualists value freedom,

egalitarians value equality, hierarchs value order, and fatalists value (good) luck (see

Figure 1, Coyle 1994, and Swedlow 2008).

The Cultural Construction of Nature and Public Policy in Cultural Theory and the

Pacific Northwest

Michael Thompson has been particularly instrumental in characterizing the

cultural constructs of nature in Douglass theory (Schwarz and Thompson 1990, 8-13;

Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavksy 1990, 26-33; as discussed in Jasanoff and Wynne 1998).

Adapted from Thompsons work, the constructs of nature that are functional for the

different patterns of social relations are mapped onto the dimensions of social relations in

Figure 2, where a ball in a landscape represents the constructs of nature:

In the individualistic construction, the ball is in a deep pocket, difficult to knock

out: this represents nature as benign, resilient, or even robust or cornucopian. 8

The egalitarian construct of nature is most nearly the opposite of this: the ball is

perched precariously on top of a pinnacle; the slightest disturbance will send it

irretrievably downhill: this represents nature as fragile or ephemeral.

The hierarchical construct of nature combines these two constructs: the ball is in a

shallow pocket; small disturbances will not dislodge it, but large ones will; nature

is construed as being benign or resilient within limits, beyond which it is fragile,

ephemeral, or unpredictable. 9

In the fatalistic construction of nature, the ball is on a flat surface; it can roll any

which way; this represents the unpredictability or capriciousness of nature;

21
 sometimes benign, resilient, or even robust or cornucopian, sometimes fragile or

ephemeral, without discernable rhyme or reason.

The scientific debate regarding owls and ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest can

be characterized as an argument between environmentalists and their academic

sympathizers on the one hand and federal and industry scientists on the other over how

shallow the pocket was, or whether the ball was in a pocket at all. However, federal

scientists came fairly close to arguing that ecosystems were unpredictable being not

only more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think -- while

scientists working for industry argued for the resiliency and adaptability of the owl and

ecosystems.10 The debate effectively concluded when environmentalists and their

academic sympathizers persuaded federal judges that the ball was teetering on the lip of

the pocket or, alternatively, about to fall off its pinnacle perch (Sher 1993; Swedlow

2002a, 2003, 2007, 2009).

Figure 2

[about here]

From these constructions of nature it is also possible to deduce the types of

policies that will be pursued toward the environment. Individualists will take a very

hands-on, transformative approach, which is what the timber industry advocated: Tell us

what owl habitat looks like and well grow it. They also suggested constructing nest

boxes and breeding owls in captivity and trucking them between habitat areas rather than

retaining old trees with nesting cavities and providing forested migratory routes.

Egalitarians will take a hands-off, tread lightly approach, which is what

environmentalists wanted when they advocated the complete halt of timber harvests that

22
was mostly achieved. Hierarchs will be activist, but only to a point that is sustainable,

which was the approach taken historically by the Forest Service with respect to timber

harvesting and by Forest Service ecologist Jerry Franklin and his New Forestry ideas

about selective harvesting and leaving biological legacies like decadent and fallen trees

in place. Fatalists will remain passive in the face of natures fickle moods, a position that

(in addition to the egalitarian tread lightly approach) significantly influenced the

approach taken by federal research biologist Jack Ward Thomas and the Forest

Ecosystem Management Assessment Team he headed (FEMAT 1993, Yaffee 1994,

Chase 1995; Swedlow 2002a, 2003, 2007, 2009; see also Coyle 1994; Ellis and

Thompson 1997; and Pokorny and Schanz 2003).

The Co-production of Scientific, Cultural, and Policy Change in Cultural Theory

and the Pacific Northwest

But if preferences and perception are socially constructed in such a way as to

justify particular patterns of social relations, how does change ever occur?, ask

Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky in their seminal refinement of Douglass

theory (1990, 69). Much the same way, they answer, as scientific theories lose and

gain adherents: the cumulative impact of successive anomalies or surprises. Anomalies

and surprises occur because nature, for all its accommodating ways, does not meekly

accept every cultural construction we try to impose on it, and, in fighting back, it

generates a countervailing force: the natural destruction of culture

In other words, cultural theorists locate a catalyst for scientific, cultural, and

policy change in surprises generated by encounters with nature in which nature displays

properties or reveals characteristics that are at odds with scientifically or culturally

23
generated expectations. Stipulating the world is one way and finding out that it actually

appears to be another leads to a variety of predictable consequences, and can lead to such

changes. 11 This is one reason constructs of nature can become so heavily contested: they

are a major way that cultures justify and stabilize themselves. Successfully casting doubt

on a constructs correspondence to reality is to unmoor social and political life from its

grounding in nature. Deconstructing rival constructs of nature is therefore a major way

that scientific, cultural, and policy change is hypothesized to occur (see also Wildavsky

2006c [1995]; Lockhart 1997; Swedlow 2011, 2012).

The Cultural and Scientific Construction of Nature and Forest Policy in the Pacific

Northwest

Since European settlement in the 1840s, the history of the cultural construction of

nature and forest policy in the Pacific Northwest can be recounted as individualistic

constructs being displaced by hierarchical constructs, which in turn have given way to

egalitarian ones. Some of these constructs were co-produced with science, while others

were co-produced with religious or philosophical teachings. This history will be briefly

sketched here to show that cultural constructions of nature in the Pacific Northwest have

taken the forms and are associated with the values and/or social relations hypothesized by

cultural theory. The more recent history will then be analyzed in greater detail,

demonstrating that changes in science, policy, and social order have occurred in the

manner hypothesized by cultural theory.

European settlers of the Pacific Northwest blended the rugged individualism of

the frontier with hierarchical religious notions of doing the Lords work by clearing

forests for farming (Nash 1984: 103). The Forest Service sought to sustain an internal

24
frontier on its lands in perpetuity as the American frontier closed around 1890 by using

scientific management to set limits on harvests (Yaffee 1994, 3-8, 256-82). This

hierarchical turn-of-the-century movement to conserve forests, led by Gifford Pinchot,

founder and first chief of the Forest Service, triumphed (for the next 70-80 years) over a

contemporaneous egalitarian movement to preserve them in National Parks and

Wilderness Areas, spearheaded by naturalist and closet radical egalitarian John Muir,

founder of the Sierra Club (Nash 1984, 107-10, 125-26; 1989, 41; Coyle 1994). Publicly,

Muir argued that preserving forests was important primarily for people, for rest and

recuperation, for aesthetic satisfaction, for spiritual nourishment, and for the protection of

mountain watersheds (Nash 1984, 41). Privately, he saw national parks as places where

snakes, redwood trees, beavers, and rocks could exercise their natural rights to life and

liberty (Ibid).

Meanwhile, the Save the Redwoods League, founded in 1920, was influenced by

uni-directional, progressive understandings of evolution, seeing these massive trees as

victors in the struggle for survival, a master race of trees, counterparts of League

members who were successful businessmen, industrialists, and scientists. As historian

Susan Schrepfer (1983, 44) further notes:

These trees also proved that free struggle in evolution or, in social terms,

freedom of opportunity did not lead to equality. Orientals [according to one

League member] know this; they do not ask for equality any more than those

plants under the Sequoias (Ibid).

This hierarchical view of the redwoods also drew on an applied version of evolutionary

biology called eugenics, which sought to improve humanity through selective breeding.

25
At least 11 of the 26 founding members of the League subscribed to eugenics (43).

Of these men, Schrepfer reports, Charles Goethe best articulated the

relationship between preservation and eugenics, exemplifying one kind of hierarchical

construct of nature. Goethe wanted the laws of eugenics taught to the general public and

he saw the creation of redwood parks as a good way to do so:

He was one of the first to sponsor park naturalist programs and subsequently

financed the early interpretive work of the National Park Service He believed

that increasing the publics biological awareness would ease passage of

immigration laws and promote selective breeding (43-44).

The League shared a common leadership, membership, and understanding of nature with

the Sierra Club until the late 1950s, from which point on the Sierra Club was influenced

by newer, non-deterministic understandings of evolution. These and other influences

increasingly radicalized the Sierra Club leadership in the 1960s and 1970s to adopt more

egalitarian constructs of nature (45, 79-108, 170).

As will be discussed in greater detail shortly, research beginning in the 1970s

challenged the Forest Services view that old-growth forests were cellulose cemeteries

that needed to be harvested. Researchers at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in

Oregon found that these older forests were home to a wide variety of interdependent life

forms. Environmental groups were excited by this research because it gave them a further

reason to value and preserve older forests. Research specifically on the relationship

between the Northern Spotted Owl and old-growth forests became a particular focus of

these groups because animal species were protected by various environmental laws

passed in the early and mid 1970s. The development of this research and environmental

26
groups interest in this research thus are one significant area where political cultural

conditions were ripe for the co-production of three cultural boundaries of science,

institutions, and policy (see, generally, Yaffee, 1994; Chase, 1995; and Luoma, 1999).

Meanwhile, Deep Ecology concerns for species and forests, and the suspicion

that mainstream environmental groups were too ready to compromise with other interests,

led in 1980 to the creation of Earth First!, an environmental guerilla group that sabotaged

and blockaded logging equipment and operations, sometimes resulting in serious bodily

injury to loggers, before adopting more peaceful methods of protest, staging a Redwood

Summer in 1990, modeled on the Freedom Summers of the civil rights movement (Chase

1995, 308-12). Deep Ecology is a philosophy that, among other things, assigns equal

moral worth to human and nonhuman species, and distinguishes radical environmental

groups like Earth First! from more mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club

(Ellis 1998, 228-51; Ellis and Thompson 1997). Earth First! did not much care about

science because they did not need scientists to tell them that nature was valuable, fragile,

and should be left alone.12

Jerry Franklin, Old-Growth Forest Ecosystems, and Environmentalists

One area where the natural destruction of science, culture, and policy appeared to

occur in the Pacific Northwest was in the influence changing scientific understandings of

older forests had on forest and wildlife science and management. The research at H.J.

Andrews Experimental Forest that helped produce these changes began in the early 1970s

and was led by Jerry Franklin, the chief plant ecologist at the Forest Service research

station at Oregon State University (Chase 151-55; Luoma 1999).

27
 In 1977, a forest planner approached Franklin looking for a definition of old-

growth forest, so that the Forest Service could manage it properly under the newly passed

National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which mandated management of all types of

forest. To come up with a definition, Franklin convened his researchers. The paper

resulting from the meeting, Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir

Forests, described all the interdependencies among life forms that the researchers had

discovered (Chase 1995, 154).

Franklin also gave an interview to an undergraduate student activist organization

at Oregon State University. A compendium including this interview, titled Saving All

the Pieces: Old Growth Forests in Oregon (LaFollette 1979), prompted the Audubon

Society, a birding organization, to organize a conference to which Franklin read his

research teams paper publicly for the first time (Chase 1995, 161-62). Chase reports that

Environmentalists badly wanted to see the paper published as proof that science was on

their side13The entire Northwest conservation community began to rally around the

issue of old growth. Within the space of five years from 1975 to 1980 its interest had

shifted from setting aside rock and ice wilderness [at higher elevations] to saving mature

forests at lower elevations, bringing environmentalists into direct conflict with forest

managers (Chase 1995, 162).

Eric Forsman, Andy Stahl, Russell Lande, and the Scientific Basis for the Owl

Litigation

Proceeding roughly in parallel with the research of the H.J. Andrews team was the

research of wildlife biologist Eric Forsman, also begun in the early 1970s, on the

relationship between the Northern Spotted Owl and old-growth forests (Yaffee 1994, 14-

28
19). Forsmans research became a focal point for the co-production of science and social

and political order, and a catalyst for the most dramatic scientific, cultural, and policy

change in forest management in the Pacific Northwest.

Aided by the fact that his academic advisor occupied two powerful positions

straddling the border between research and regulatory science, 14 Forsmans masters

thesis research became the basis for Oregons land and wildlife management agencies to

agree to protect 300 acres of 200-year-old forest for each of 400 pairs of owls, about two

percent of the states remaining old-growth (Yaffee 1994, 34). Further studies by

Forsman led the agencies to expand per pair set-asides to 1000 acres, which the timber

industry estimated would cost one million dollars per pair (Yaffee 1994, 53).

Meanwhile, Forest Service biologists, influenced by concepts from the new field

of conservation biology, were re-writing their regulations concerning species diversity to

include not only diversity of species, but genetic diversity within a species, as well as

diversity of biological communities (Yaffee 1994, 59-60). Since the father of

conservation biology, Michael Soule, claimed that the minimum population size

necessary to preserve genetic diversity was 500 pairs of a species, Forest Service

biologists decided that at least 500 pairs of owls had to be protected (Yaffee 1994, 62).

Then, the distribution of the population in the landscape was also recognized as an

important contributor to species viability. Accordingly, Forest Service biologists

developed a rule that a species had to be well distributed throughout the planning area

(Yaffee 1994, 58). Their modeling effort led to doubling the size of the habitat areas,

which was anticipated to cause a five percent reduction in allowable agency timber sales

(Yaffee 1994, 96).

29
 While environmental groups agreed with industry groups that agency modeling

efforts had a poor biological basis, they did not think gathering more data was the

solution; data collection would take too long (Swedlow 2002a, 206-08). Instead, they saw

in the agencys shift from studying owl populations to modeling them an opportunity to

challenge the agency on new scientific territory. If they could find a scientist to do a

better modeling job than agency scientists had, modeling that supported the inference that

the owl was endangered by plans to protect it, they would be able to challenge those

plans in court and win.

No one understood better how to displace the agencies presumed expertise with

outside scientific authority than Andy Stahl, then working at the National Wildlife

Federation, later a resource analyst at the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF).

With Soules help, Stahl located Russell Lande, a theoretical biologist at the University

of Chicago (Chase 1995, 246). Stahl explained the problem: he needed a paper to prove

logging hurt owls, [which] not only wouldhave to exhibit impeccable scholarship,

but also [would have] to be timely and written in terms that a judge could understand

(246-47). Landes paper was ready in June 1985, when Stahl published it at a press

conference (247).

Landes paper modeled both owl habitat needs and population declines. Lande

predicted that if old growth were reduced to less than 21 percent (+/- 2 percent) of the

region owls cannot persist, and that the owl would in fact go extinct under the Forest

Services management plans because they called for harvesting all but seven to sixteen

percent of the remaining old-growth. Even a plan that would double or triple the

[Spotted Owl Management Areas], assuming these to consist of 1000 acres of old growth,

30
would be likely to rapidly extinguish the population (Lande 1988, 605). Landes paper

and its importance to the owl litigation are further discussed in Swedlow 2003, 196-202.

Scientists and environmentalists were co-producing exactly the owl

environmentalists needed to shut down federal timber sales on a large scale. Its a

perfect species to use as a surrogate [for protecting old growth forests], Stahl told the

Western Public Law Conference. First of all, it is unique to old-growth forests and

theres no credible scientific dispute on that fact. Second of all, it uses a lot of old growth.

Thats convenient because we can use it to protect a lot of old growth. And third . . . it

appears the spotted owl faces an imminent risk of extinction (as quoted in Yaffee 1994,

215-16).

Andy Stahl, Victor Sher, Todd True and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Funds owl

litigation strategy

While the lead plaintiffs in the owl suits were the Portland and Seattle chapters of

the Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF) represented

these and other environmental groups, the owl litigation strategy originated with Andy

Stahl, working for SCLDF by 1987, and Victor Sher and Todd True, the SCLDFs lead

attorneys, who recruited these groups to serve as plaintiffs. SCLDF believed that they

could get much more environmental protection from Ninth Circuit federal judges under

existing law than they could from Congress, where they would have to compromise with

timber interests. For their part, established national environmental groups were reluctant

to join the movement that SCLDF claimed to serve.15 They saw SCLDFs owl litigation

strategy as high risk and feared that it would provoke a political backlash leading to a

31
weakening of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which required the protection of

species threatened with extinction.

SCLDF feared this too and hoped to avoid weakening the ESA by basing its owl

suits on other environmental laws. This is one reason Stahl tried to talk others out of

petitioning the FWS to list the owl as threatened or endangered under the Act. But there

were other reasons that SCLDF did not want the owl listed as threatened. Once the owl

was listed, SCLDF feared that federal judges would defer to FWS expertise on the owl

and the FWS would not do enough to enforce the ESA against the land management

agencies, particularly not against the Forest Service, the premier federal environmental

agency. At the same time, SCLDF believed that federal judges would be less likely to

defer to the wildlife expertise of the land management agencies than that of the FWS.

Consequently, SCLDF needed to find laws that would allow them to mount their

scientific critique directly against federal land managers. The National Environmental

Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) fit the bill

(Swedlow 2003, 202-204).

Helen Frye, Thomas Zilly, William Dwyer and the Ninth Circuits Spotted Owl

injunctions and orders to manage ecosystems

SCLDF began suing the federal land and wildlife management agencies in 1987,

gaining their first injunctions in 1991. SCLDFs suits were directed at the BLM, FWS,

and Forest Service and were heard by six district court judges, with Judges Helen Frye,

Thomas Zilly, and William Dwyer issuing the bulk of the 18 published district court

opinions in these cases (Swedlow 2003, 206-209).

32
 SCLDFs litigation strategy was initially frustrated in Judge Fryes courtroom in

their suits against the BLM, while finding unexpected success in Judge Zillys in their

suits against the FWS. But SCLDF achieved its greatest success in Judge Dwyers

courtroom in their suits against the Forest Service. Ninth Circuit appellate panels were

uniformly supportive of SCLDFs suits from the beginning, claiming that It was and is

no secret that the northern spotted owl disappears when its habitat is destroyed by

logging before the district courts had even held hearings or made factual findings on the

issue (Swedlow 2003, 210-211).

Judge Frye initially did not accept academic scientists (recruited by SCLDF)

claims that there was sufficient new information to require the BLM to reassess the

impact of its planned timber sales on the owl under NEPA. This was in part because

Judge Frye deferred to congressional amendments that removed suits based on new

information from judicial review. But Ninth Circuit appellate panels signaled their strong

support of SCLDFs suits, finding grounds to reverse Judge Frye on every appeal, going

so far as holding that Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it prohibited judicial

review of the agencies land management plans.

This ruling was in turn reversed by a unanimous Supreme Court, but the reversal

would have no effect on the continuing owl litigation because annual congressional

restrictions on judicial review were not renewed after three years when environmentalists

had built sufficient support in Congress to stop them. Judge Frye ultimately held that the

BLM had acted unreasonably when it decided not to consider new information about the

owl, even as she claimed not to be choosing among experts. This new information

consisted of models of owl population and habitat dynamics, not of new knowledge

33
regarding owl biology. A Ninth Circuit appellate panel strongly endorsed Judge Fryes

ruling, claiming that it was supported by a body of scientific evidence (Swedlow 2003,

209-225).

Meanwhile, when the FWS declined to list the owl as threatened under the ESA

due to missing population trend and other biological data, the SCLDF had little

difficulty in getting Judge Zilly to rule that the agency had not adequately justified its

decision. Judge Zilly did not defer to FWS expertise on the owl as SCLDF had feared

federal judges would. When the agency listed the owl, Judge Zilly further ruled that the

FWS should have designated the owls critical habitat concurrently with that decision. In

so ruling, Judge Zilly was undoubtedly influenced by the owl conservation strategy that

had been produced by an unprecedented collaboration among federal owl scientists

mandated by Congress in one of its appropriations riders (Swedlow 2003, 225-228, 235-

239).

This 1989 rider, known as the Northwest Timber Compromise, required federal

land management agencies in the region to sell specific amounts of timber, mandated that

no sales were to come from spotted owl habitat areas identified in agencies planning

documents, added specific protected areas for the owl, and directed the agencies to

designate other appropriate areas as protected. This amendment also incorporated an

interagency agreement directing the formation of an Interagency Scientific Committee

(ISC) charged with developing a scientifically credible conservation strategy for the

owl (Swedlow 2003, 215-216).

The ISC conservation strategy vastly expanded forest set-asides for the owl

because it recommended that owls be protected in groups of twenty pairs rather than in

34
individual pairs. The ISC claimed that models played a secondary role in developing their

conservation strategy, with empirical studies of owls playing the primary role. Yet they

readily conceded that apparent owl population declines observed in a couple of study

areas could not be used to predict declines in owl populations. They also conceded that

forest structure was a more important determinant of owl habitat than forest age, and that

owls could be found reproducing in stands as young as 80 years, and even 50 years,

provided that there were a few remnants of old growth (Thomas et al 1990). Industry

lawyers claimed that the ISC created a faade of science to obscure a series of

professional judgments (Swedlow 2003, 229-235). When the FWS designated the owls

critical habitat, the agency built on the ISC recommendations, expanding owl set-asides

even further (Swedlow 2003, 239-240).

No judge played a more significant role in facilitating the rise of ecosystem

management in the Pacific Northwest than Judge Dwyer. Not only was he the first to

enjoin federal timber sales to protect the owl, but his injunction alone fundamentally

altered the politics of the issue because the Forest Service owned most of the federal

lands in the region. This temporary but 100 percent reduction in sales (when extended to

BLM lands by Judge Fryes injunction) created the policy window for FEMAT (1993)

and President Clinton to propose a 75 percent permanent reduction for all federal lands in

the region, going significantly beyond the ISC recommendations in an effort to protect

1000 species associated with old-growth forest ecosystems.

Judge Dwyer also ordered the agencies to develop plans that would protect not

only the owl but biological communities. This order implied that only an owl

management plan that also managed ecosystems would be sufficient to lift the injunction.

35
This order was the result of considerable judicial activism, with Judge Dwyer finding a

mandate for ecosystem management in NFMA implementing regulations written by

Forest Service biologists. These regulations required the agency to maintain viable

populations of vertebrates on agency lands, arguably going beyond the ESAs focus on

the recovery of individual species, but not requiring ecosystem management per se, nor

the protection of biological communities. Judge Dwyer also read NEPA to require

assessment of owl management impacts on agency lands, and, furthermore, he allowed

the Clinton administration to extend ecosystem management to BLM lands and to

invertebrates on both BLM and Forest Service lands.

Judges Frye, Zilly, and Dwyer adopted very different postures toward the

scientists before them, which had significant consequences for the co-production of

scientific, cultural, and policy change. Judge Frye was very reluctant to choose among

scientists, and she was the only one to give any space in her opinions to the critique of an

owl expert testifying on behalf of the timber industry. She relied primarily on owl

assessments produced by BLMs own biologists to hold that the agency must reassess its

timber sale program. Judge Zilly, on the other hand, sided with a lone FWS dissenter and

three concurring outside scientists to find that the agency had acted arbitrarily and

capriciously in deciding not to list the owl as threatened. He selectively quoted the

industry owl expert to make it appear that all scientists outside the agency thought the

owl should be listed.

For his part, Judge Dwyer barely even acknowledged industry experts in his

opinions that lead to an injunction of Forest Service timber sales, but lent an especially

sympathetic ear to critiques of agency owl plans offered by scientists testifying on behalf

36
of SCLDF. Even though the ISC conservation strategy afforded vastly more protection

for the owl than set-asides for owl pairs, and Judge Dwyer initially was impressed by the

ISC report, he was soon persuaded that their plan might not go far enough when FWS

biologists produced an analysis suggesting that owl populations were declining faster

than previously thought and academic scientists testified that the owls decline might

even be worse than that, having passed a threshold from which it could not recover

(Swedlow 2003, 243-263, 267-272). Judicial rulings in the owl cases consequently

depended on resolving contested factual and legal issues in ways that required a dramatic

reduction of federal timber sales and the implementation of ecosystem management.

Institutional and Policy Change in and around the Forest Service

According to Jasanoff, co-production is frequently responsible for making

identities, making institutions, making discourses, and making representations (2004,

38; italics in the original). The concept of co-production helps us understand how

knowledge and its production shape and sustain social and political identities and give

them power and meaning (39). And because [i]nstitutions serve as sites for the testing

and reaffirmation of political culture they are also sites for the co-production of science

and social and political order (40). When knowledge changes specifically, when

environmental knowledge changes new institutions emerge to provide the web of

social and normative understandings within which new characterizations of naturecan

be recognized and given political effect (40). Finally, science and social and political

order are co-produced by making discourses and representations. As Jasanoff notes,

Solving problems of social order frequently takes the form of producing new languages

or modifying old ones In the process, scientific language often takes on board the tacit

37
models of nature, society, culture, or humanity that are current at any time within a given

social order (40-41).

Hierarchical identities were transformed and egalitarian ones created in both

individuals and institutions, particularly in the Forest Service. At the individual level, the

identities of foresters were transformed from model agency employees into narrow

minded, voracious timber beasts in the minds of many environmentalists.

Non-game wildlife biologists, by contrast, moved from the periphery of the land

management agencies to the center, becoming heroes to many environmentalists.

Conservation biologists in particular gained in stature, as many of their theories and

concepts became the basis for owl management plans in the region. These changes in

identity are also associated with changes in power and authority, with foresters losing

power and authority and wildlife biologists, and particularly conservation biologists,

gaining them.

Soules influence on Forest Service owl management occurred while he was self-

consciously working to construct the identity of conservation biologists. Conservation

biology differs from most other biological sciences in one important way: it is often a

crisis discipline, Soule wrote in 1985. Its relation to biology, particularly ecology, is

analogous to that of surgery to physiology and war to political science. In crisis

disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture

of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information. A

conservation biologist may have to make decisions or recommendations about design and

management before he or she is completely comfortable with the theoretical and

empirical basis of the analysis (Soule, 1985, 727).

38
 Thus, the rise of conservation biology co-produced in part by scientists,

environmentalists, and judges in the owl litigation not only changed the identity of

biologists relative to foresters and other agency scientists and professionals, but it may

have contributed to changing the identity of wildlife biologists and more generally what it

means to be a scientist within the land and wildlife management agencies. These changes

in the identity of scientists and their institutional participation in policymaking were co-

produced in significant part by processes of boundary-work relying on pollution and

purity claims that are discussed more fully below.

At the institutional level, the identity (and power and authority) of the land and

wildlife agencies changed in ways parallel to that of the professionals most associated

with each agency. Ninth Circuit rulings radically changed identities, authority, and power

relationships among and within the land and wildlife management agencies, effectively

handing control of land management to nongame wildlife biologists, previously the least

influential members of these agencies. Within the land management agencies this

inverted the previous relationship between foresters and wildlife biologists, while among

agencies previous relationships were also turned upside down, with the FWS effectively

gaining control of much of the land management done by the BLM and Forest Service.

The co-production of the owl litigation also played a significant role in

transforming each of these institutions. Changes in the Forest Service have been

particularly well documented. Commensurate with the direction of external pressure from

interest groups, Congress, and the courts (Sabatier, Loomis, and McCarthy 1995;

Farnham 1995; Jones and Callaway 1995; Jones and Taylor 1995), as well as internal

pressures from employees (McCarthy, Sabatier, and Loomis 1991; Kennedy, Krannich,

39
Quigley, and Cramer 1992; Brown and Harris 1992a, 1992b, 1993), the agency has been

transformed in an egalitarian direction (Farnham 1995; Farnham and Mohai, 1995;

Farnham, Taylor, and Callaway 1995), although it is probably most accurate to view

many of these changes as an egalitarian overlay on (and undermining of) an hierarchical

foundation (Tipple and Wellman 1991), producing an hierarchical-egalitarian hybrid

regime familiar to cultural theorists (Wildavsky, 2006b [1986], 2006c [1995]; Lockhart

1997; Verweij and Thompson 2006; and Swedlow 2002b, 2006a, xxii-xxiii,

forthcoming).

Thus, whereas the Forest Service used to be concerned primarily with efficiency

and economy in producing timber and other commodities from national forests, these

values are now applied to a wider range of outputs, including producing non-commodity

values, and the agency is now additionally concerned with being responsive to and

representative of the public (Tipple and Wellman 1991). Before 1960, forest rangers

were seen as the expert, local authority, and manager-in-charge (Tipple and Wellman

1991, 423). By 1990 forest rangers have become public servants and facilitators of

public dialogue (424). The old, hierarchical system relied on dog loyalty

unquestioning obedience to the agency and an acceptance of authoritarian governmental

decision-making by experts. More recently, agency employees exhibit cat loyalty,

insisting on more democratic, participatory decision-making and the right to dissent

(Jack Ward Thomas, as quoted in Chase 1995, 174).

This change from hierarchical to egalitarian ways of organizing decision-making,

authority, and power in the Forest Service has been endorsed by its chiefs and

institutionalized in Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an organization

40
founded by Andy Stahl. Dale Robertson, chief of the Forest Service during the owl

litigation, described the forest managers new role as one of guiding, educating,

advising, and encouraging rather than regulating and controlling (Robertson 1989, as

quoted in Tipple and Wellman 1991, 425). Various pressures, including civil rights law

suits, have also led the agency to diversify its hiring practices (Kennedy 1991; Brown and

Harris 1993; Thomas and Mohai 1995). Once exclusively male and white, Forest Service

employees now include women and minorities, an inclusiveness and leveling of the

playing field that is also attractive to egalitarians.

Discourses and representations have also shifted significantly in an egalitarian

direction, in significant part as a result of the co-productive processes of the owl

litigation. The agricultural factory approach to forestry seeking sustainability in

production of forest commodities has been displaced by a discourse that represents nature

as ecosystems. This discourse and representation resonates with collectivists both

hierarchical and egalitarian, but particularly with egalitarians because, as in the human

communities they are trying to create, all members of the biological community are

presumptively equally important to the preservation and functioning of the whole.

Ecosystems are also complex, requiring lots of varied expertise to understand let alone to

manage. Hierarchical organizations naturally gravitate toward creating this expertise,

while egalitarians like the inclusiveness and equalization of experts that studying and

managing ecosystems invites (see, generally, Cortner and Moote 1999; Fitzsimmons

1999). Along the way from multi-use forestry to ecosystem management, Chief

Robertson attempted to develop New Perspectives on forestry, borrowing from Jerry

Franklins New Forestry ideas. But when the discourse around ecosystem management

41
appeared to have more support, Robertson embraced it, seeking to shape it into

something the agency could do (Freeman 2002, 639-643).

Re-casting Cultural Theory as a Theory of the Coproduction of Boundaries relying

on Pollution and Purity Claims

This might be the end of the story, and, indeed, in other accounts it has been

(Swedlow 2011, 2012). However, the main drivers of scientific, cultural, institutional,

and policy change here are not just cultural surprise and co-production of science and

social order. Boundary-work relying on pollution and purity claims was also very

important in producing the changes analyzed here (Swedlow 2007). What remains, then,

is the challenge of integrating these explanations into a single explanation. Thankfully,

this challenge is made easier by the fact that Douglass early formulations of cultural

theory characterized its cultural dimensions and types in terms of social boundaries, and

was centrally concerned with understanding efforts to maintain the purity of bounded

social units and how social worlds could be corrupted by breaches of these boundaries.

Thus, in re-stating cultural theory as a theory of boundaries, this paper is in many ways

simply returning to Douglass initial formulation, which already joins many of the

concepts it seeks to re-combine here in order to provide a more unified, fuller explanation

of the scientific, cultural, institutional, and policy changes in this case.

In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo

(1966), Douglas adapted Emile Durkheims concepts of the sacred and profane

(developed for the study of western religions in Durkheim, 1915) to the study of

primitive religions, where they became purity and pollution. Douglas identified four

sources of social pollution: (1) danger pressing on a groups external boundaries, (2)

42
danger from transgressing the internal boundaries, or lines, of a group, (3) danger in the

margins of the boundaries, a sort of no-mans borderland, and (4) danger from internal

contradiction, when some of the basic organizing principles are denied by or clash with

other such basic principles, so that the group seems to be at war with itself. Douglas

further developed these ideas in Natural Symbols (1970) and (with Aaron Wildavsky) in

Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers

(1982).

Douglass resulting grid-group cultural theory, as further developed by

Wildavsky and others, became the cultural theory described in this piece. To re-cast

cultural theory as a theory of the co-production of boundaries, one needs to re-focus on

the social boundaries in the theory. The collectivist cultures, hierarchy and egalitarianism,

share a strong external boundary, separating those who are inside the group from those

who are outside the group. However, hierarchy and egalitarianism differ with respect to

further social boundaries. Hierarchy further bounds individuals within the group,

maintaining and even multiplying distinctions, while egalitarians are concerned to erode

these kinds of divisions, particularly the kinds of stratification that lead to differences in

power. Meanwhile, individualists dislike collective boundaries, preferring strong

boundaries around individuals, allowing the individual to defend against encroachments

by group demands. Finally, fatalists are distinguished by the absence of boundaries,

either collective or individual. They cannot defend themselves against encroachments by

collectives or individualists, and are at the mercy of the comings and goings of the other

cultural types.

43
Pollution and Purity Claims and Boundary-work

Stated most generally, pollution claims are claims that some social boundary,

such as that between law and politics, religion and politics, or science and politics has

been breached, impermissibly allowing activity in one sphere to intermingle with activity

in another, polluting it. Purity claims are claims that such social boundaries remain intact,

that no boundary has been breached, no pollution has occurred. In the way these concepts

are applied here, scientific pollution claims are effectively attempts to use contamination

by some aspect of non-science to lower the standing of scientists. Purity claims are

claims not to have been polluted or contaminated by contact with non-scientific

elements.16

Purity and pollution claims facilitate boundary-work, which Sheila Jasanoff

helpfully defines in the scientific context as a communally approved drawing of lines

between good and bad work (and, not trivially, between good and bad workers)

within a single discipline, between different disciplines, and between science and other

forms of authoritative knowledge (Jasanoff 1995: 53; emphasis in original).

Scientific pollution and purity claims can be and are used to construct and

maintain boundaries between science and non-science (see Gieryn 1983, 1999). But this

is not the only possible purpose or result of such claims. As can be inferred from David

Bloors work, which extends Durkheim and Douglass concepts to the study of science,

people contrast sacred, pure versions of scientific activity with profane, polluted ones to

make distinctions not just between scientists and non-scientists, but among better and

lesser scientists (Bloor 1986, 47).17

44
 In other words, pollution and purity claims also can and do use the boundary

between science and non-science to help create and maintain boundaries within science,

allowing distinctions to be made among scientists. Thus, the boundary-work that creates

and maintains the boundary between science and non-science becomes a rhetorical

resource for constructing further boundaries within science, differentiating scientists by

the extent to which they have been polluted or compromised by contact with non-science.

In a different way of putting it, pollution and purity claims allow the boundary-work that

achieves distinctions between science and non-science to serve a second purpose as a

resource for making distinctions among scientists. Of course, every time pollution and

purity claims are made, even where their primary purpose is to distinguish among

scientists, they also do double-duty reaffirming the location and nature of the boundary

between science and non-science.

Pollution and purity claims may be understood as elements of what Nigel Gilbert

and Michael Mulkay call the contingent repertory of scientific discourse, where

scientists claim that scientific findings are contingent on personal inclinations, social

positions, and other factors outside the realm of empiricalphenomena (Gilbert and

Mulkay 1984: 57; for analysis relying on contingent repertories that recognizes the

concept of social pollution see Kerr, Cunningham-Burley, and Amos 1997).

Constructing Authoritative Owl and Forest Scientists through Boundary-work

relying on Pollution and Purity Claims

Pollution and purity claims were first encountered when attempting to define the

population of scientists to be included in this study. Who was an owl or forest scientist

for the purposes of this research? The literature suggested that the best way to build this

45
kind of sample was to identify a few people known to be part of the sample and ask them

to help you identify others. This is called referral or snowball sampling. The idea is that

when you keep coming up with the same names, you have defined the population you

want to study (see, e.g., Luker 1984, Appendix).

Industrial Pollution

Owl and forest scientists were identified from government planning documents

and public critiques of them by industry and environmental groups. These scientists were

then asked to help identify other scientists who were knowledgeable and differed about

forests and spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest. For some scientists these turned out to

be mutually exclusive categories. One claimed that scientists who were knowledgeable

did not differ, and that those who differed were not scientists. There might be six or

seven PhDs who disagree, he conceded, but of course I dont count them because they

work for the timber industry. That is, for this scientist, the scientific status of these

nominal colleagues was irretrievably compromised by their industry affiliations. This

claim of industrial pollution was intended to place these scientists outside the relevant

scientific community not just lower their standing within it.

Further examples of industrial and other pollution claims are provided by a

confrontation federal wildlife biologist Jack Ward Thomas had with one of three

statisticians hired by an industry group to critique his committees owl protection plans. 18

As Thomas recounted it, that confrontation went like this:

I asked, Have you ever been to the Pacific Northwest? Thomas recalled. He

said no. I asked, Have you ever seen a spotted owl? He said no. I asked if he

46
 was paid. He said he spent five days on his report for six thousand dollars and six

hours reading our plan. I said, Youre a pimp (as quoted in Dietrich 1992, 73).

Thomass questions are good examples of the variety of ways in which scientists who

lent their support to industry were deprived of their scientific authority. None of these

questions, it should be noted, addressed the methodological criticisms made by these

scientists, which might have resulted in boundary-work and pollution and purity claims

geared to the internal politics of science. Rather, Thomass questions are examples of

boundary-work based on claims that science had been polluted by breaches of the

science/non-science boundary. These claims were intended to place these scientists

outside the relevant scientific community, or at least severely degrade their authority

within it.

First, Thomas suggested that these scientists were literally outsiders, and that they

were therefore not part of the relevant, regionally defined scientific community that had

the authority to speak on behalf of the owl. They had never been to the area and had

never seen the owl. Here is an instance where the cartography that Gieryn (1999) uses as

a metaphor to develop the concept of boundary-work in science is used to make a real

geographic distinction among scientists. In pointing to these facts and by noting that this

scientist (only) spent six hours reading Thomass owl plan and five days preparing his

critique, Thomas was also implicitly making a claim that these scientists had a

substantially lesser understanding of the owl than those who had prepared the plan -- and

perhaps even were incompetent. The clincher, however, was Thomass asking whether

this scientist had been paid. The implication here was that this scientist had sold out to

timber interests. His statistical skills were a prostitute pimped to industry for thousands of

47
dollars. Thomass metaphorical reference to prostitution, an illegal activity in most states

and an immoral activity for many people, also helps suggest compound boundary

violations and sources of pollution.

During the course of the owl controversy, Thomas became an increasingly

consequential figure in developing science-based policy recommendations and directing

their implementation. He chaired the first interagency scientific committee on the owl,

the so-called Thomas Committee, leading President Clinton to appoint him to head his

Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) and then the Forest Service,

the first time a wildlife biologist and not a career forester had led the agency. Thomass

vigorous pollution-claim-laced defense of the Thomas Committees efforts on behalf of

the owl, proudly recounted by Thomas, suggests that pollution and purity claims were

indeed central to the process of building an authoritative scientific community with

policy-making power.

It is worth noting that the concept of a pollution claim, while not explicitly

discussed, is intuitively understood by at least some scientists, helping to validate it. For

example, when an academic scientist who consults for industry was asked to comment on

a rebuttal a government scientist had written to criticism of President Clintons

management plan, the academic scientist responded much as a sociologist or

anthropologist might. Ive circled certain words [in the governments rebuttal] that form

a very interesting pattern, he noted. Whenever they refer to [the critique by the

industry-affiliated scientist], they refer to it as an industry report, the implication

[being] that something related to industry is therefore tainted and not ecologically

sound.

48
 Industrial pollution claims were the ones most frequently heard. Their constitutive

effect for the scientific community, and consequently their constructive effect on nature

and environmental policy were very important in this case. By excommunicating

industry-affiliated scientists, or at least severely degrading their authority, the rest were

able to constitute themselves as the scientific community that counted for purposes of

characterizing owl populations and habitat and forest history and processes, as well as for

deciding which land management policies to pursue.

University and Other Sources of Purification and Efforts to Resist Them

If the most polluted scientists were seen as the ones who worked for industry, the

purest were those who worked for universities, according to the scientists and non-

scientists who helped construct the scientific community in this case. Former academics-

turned-industry scientists noted that academic scientists were treated like gods and

were the arbiters of this thing. Since he had begun working for industry, one said, he

did not experience the same level of deference accorded him as a professor; his work was

questioned much more once he became a timber company biologist.

In making purity claims, scientists tried to associate themselves with aspects of

scientific activity that conferred scientific authority while dissociating themselves from

aspects that did not. Thus, because academic scientists were assigned greater scientific

authority than government and industry scientists, these latter emphasized academic

affiliations whenever possible. Among academic scientists, some kept mentioning their

research projects at the prestigious Harvard University Forest to elevate themselves over

academic rivals. Among government scientists, research biologists were accorded greater

authority than field biologists or naturalists. Some scientists tried to associate themselves

49
with great scientists of the past, including Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Max

Planck, to establish their scientific purity and authority.

Industry-affiliated scientists also found ways to level pollution claims against

their university and government critics. One former academic-turned-industry-scientist

questioned the independence of university scientists, accusing them of manufacturing

species extinction crises to secure government funding. Here, the implication was that

research interests or findings were being polluted by financial incentives.

Another industry-affiliated scientist suggested that government-type

ecologistsbought into current theory because it [provides] research money, a steady job

in a tenured position, and makes you popular with the girls. Some of these older

professors, he intimated, have gotten onto these popular issues and left their wives.

This, of course, is another example of a compound pollution claim, with pollution arising

from financial and job security considerations, not to mention pollution by baser, more

venal urges or affairs of the heart. These pollution claims are not designed to transform

university and government scientists into non-scientists, but rather use these claimed

breaches of the science/non-science boundary to try to deprive these scientists of their

authoritative and policy-consequential positions within this scientific community.

Political and Ideological Pollution

Industry scientists also claimed that the work of government scientists was polluted by

political or ideological considerations. I think their statements are highly debatable,

inaccurate, and theyre politically motivated, rather than scientifically derived, an

industry-affiliated scientist said of scientists defending President Clintons Forest

Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT). I think its pretty politically

50
motivated, bad, bad science [that] were seeing in action here. In addition to claiming

pollution from political sources, scientists referenced a number of political concepts, such

as ideology, philosophy, myth, bias, beliefs, and group think when making pollution

claims about rivals work. Thus an industry-affiliated scientist claimed that FEMAT was

a group of biased scientists thatmade a bunch of unsubstantiated statements that got

the public all excited [and] the President all excited and now one of them is Chief of

the Forest Service, so they achieved the political ends they were looking for19

Assuming that because you have a bunch of experts theyll come up with a

rational, balanced solution, another claimed, citing the book, Groupthink, is whats

brought us such things as the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion (referencing

Janis 1972). Such analogies to political events widely perceived as debacles were of

course attempts not only to color the FEMAT effort as political, but as a political debacle.

A further example of a political and ideological pollution claim is provided by

forestry professor Bill Atkinsons critique of Franklins New Forestry ideas. Atkinson

analogized New Forestry, which he called politically correct forestry (quoted in

Luoma, 1999, 169) to Chinas Cultural Revolution, where Mao Zedong had proclaimed

flowerbeds an ideological distraction. The next morning everyone is outside, pulling up

flowerbeds. Of course, we dont have Chairman Mao. Weve got Jerry (quoted in

Dietrich 1992, 111).

Other industry-affiliated scientists characterized FEMAT scientists as subscribing

to a philosophy or ideology or perpetuating a myth by characterizing pre-

settlement forests as stable, old-growth ecosystems uninfluenced by humans implying

pollution from political and ideological sources. I would flat out call [this] their

51
mythology, one said. Another industry-affiliated scientist joined this criticism, writing

that the FEMAT assessment reflects a dangerous myth [and] ideology [that] have led

some people to believe that humans are not part of nature... (Bonnicksen 1993, 14).

Another industry-affiliated scientist claimed that the large reserves approach

[adopted by FEMAT] is based on the steady state approach and other philosophies: that

humans can not/should not try to interfere with natural processes to promote their values;

[and] that humans do not understand enough to intervene in natural processes (Oliver

1993, 3). FEMAT scientists countered that the emphasis industry-affiliated scientists

placed on natural disturbances was political, i.e., politically motivated, and that more

active forms of management were like a religion to them, the analogy suggesting a

dogmatic faith that some would associate with religion, thus serving as a claim of

pollution from those sources.

A different industry-affiliated scientist offered these observations about the

FEMAT effort at a congressional hearing:

In preparing this testimony, I was overwhelmed with frustration over the extent to

which [the FEMAT Report] is being portrayed as both the voice of the scientific

community and even more categorically as science. I want to state in the

strongest possible terms that the FEMAT Report is not a scientific document

(Taylor 1992, 2).

Based on his count of how infrequently FEMAT scientists were cited in the scientific

literature, the industry-affiliated scientist testified that he was forced to conclude that the

team was overwhelmingly dominated by below-average scientists and non-scientists.

What we have here, he surmised, is a collection of policy-makers, biological

52
bureaucrats, and below-average scientists cloaked in a false mantle of scientific certainty

that they have not earned the right to wear (Ibid, 5-6). This compound set of pollution

claims suggested that some FEMAT scientists really were non-scientists, placing them

outside the science/non-science boundary, while the rest were characterized as

administrators and lesser scientists, lowering their standing and authority within science.

Making biological into an adjective for bureaucrats is an especially pungent and

efficient pollution claim in a political cultural environment where bureaucracy is

generally only seen as a necessary evil (Wildavsky 2006).

Jack Ward Thomas, the leader of the FEMAT effort, tried to give these pollution

stains a good laundering. The FEMAT Report, he said, was a management document

produced by scientists, not a scientific product, implying that its failure to have been

produced by scientific methods should not soil the reputations of FEMAT scientists. With

this boundary-work he attempted to allow FEMAT scientists to lend their scientific

authority to the Report while preventing the Report from tarnishing the very authority

from which it drew its strength. Our work as scientists, economists, analysts, and

technicians is complete, the executive summary stated, performing boundary-work

relying on subtle purity claims. Whatever decisionsmay emerge from this work are

now, most appropriately, in the hands of elected leaders (FEMAT Report 1993, I-3).

Pollution and Purity Claims made by Non-Scientists

Being a non-scientist and therefore a potential source of scientific pollution

created no apparent barriers to making scientific pollution and purity claims in this case.

Interest groups and institutional actors, from environmentalists, to timber associations, to

federal judges, and President Clintons administrators, all participated in making

53
scientific pollution and purity claims and in doing scientific boundary-work. In so doing,

they helped elevate some scientists and their views to prominence and policy

consequence, while contributing to the marginalization of others.

The decisions of this plan do not have a solid grounding in biology; they are

entirely political in nature, environmentalist Cameron LaFollete wrote in the first public

evaluation of the first agency owl plan (quoted in Yaffee 1994, 47). Andy Stahl, a

resource analyst for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, criticized the Forest Services

Regional Guide on similar grounds. I set myself to finding out what was behind the

biology of the plan, he recalled, which turned out to be nothing more than the

consensus of a number of agency bureaucrats: midlevel state and federal wildlife

biologists who were now in administrative positions. They were accustomed to

political expediency (Ibid: 75-6). Again, in a bid to degrade the authority of government

scientists, biological bureaucrats are claimed to be polluting science. In a previous

example, this claim was levied by an industry-affiliated scientist, here by an

environmentalist.

Meanwhile, this is how Stahl characterized one of the scientists he recruited to

criticize government owl plans: This guy is now the worlds top population geneticist.

His only interest is science. Hes a total babe in the woods when it comes to politics or

people. Hes been in the ivory tower all his life. Heck, Im amazed hes married. But hes

a total genius (quoted in Dietrich 1992, 220). The compound purity claim here is that

despite working for an environmental group, this scientist was the top scientist in his

field, untouched by politics or people, someone so reclused in the ivory tower of

academia that he was unsullied by such worldly concerns as sex or marriage.

54
 In large measure the [Interagency Scientific Committee] report presents a facade

of science to create the appearance that the ISC Strategy is firmly grounded in objective,

verifiable science when in fact it is not, an industry law firm wrote, in attempting to de-

legitimate the scientific planning process that preceded FEMAT:

Every component of the ISC strategy is primarily the product of professional

judgment [that] is untested, unexplained and represents, in the words of one

committee member, a management exercise rather than a scientific effort.

[The] aura of objective science that has been cast over the ISC report is not

justified, and should not inhibit close scrutiny of every component of the ISC

strategy by policy makers, administrative officials and legislators... (Preston et al.

1991, 2)

Here the pollution claim is that the ISC had engaged in management rather than scientific

activities, and that since the ISC was not doing pure science, politicians and

administrators should not fear entering its realm. Or, in another way of putting it, the

pollution claim was that the ISCs activities were already outside the realm of science, so

no harm to science would occur if non-scientists participated in these activities, which

were properly in their sphere of authority, not the ISCs.

Federal judges also contributed significantly to scientific boundary-work relying

on pollution and purity claims. Despite industry views to the contrary, Judge William

Dwyer wrote that The ISC report is widely regarded as thorough, careful, and

scientifically credible. It has been described by experts on both sides as the first

scientifically respectable proposal to come out the executive branch. Still, he noted,

The ISC strategy may or may not prove to be adequate. While it is endorsed by well-

55
qualified scientists, it is criticized by others, equally well-qualified, as over-optimistic

and risky.20

President Clintons appointees also did their share of scientific (and legal)

boundary-work relying on purity and pollution claims. The land allocations and

standards and guidelines that are adopted here satisfy all of the objectives set forth by the

President, wrote the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior, in signing off on Clintons

management plan. They comply with the requirements of federal law.... They are based

on the best available science and are ecologically sound (Espy and Babbitt 1994, 3). Not

surprisingly, the Presidents plan was immediately subject to boundary-work relying on

pollution claims. This is war, declared Brock Evans, vice-president of the National

Audubon Society. Its political science, not biological science.

Federal judges put an end to this war, at least temporarily. Judge Dwyer swept

aside challenges to President Clintons Northwest Forest Plan from both industry and

environmentalists. On their way to doing so, Judge Dwyer and other judges did their own

boundary-work among scientists, lending an especially sympathetic ear to expert

witnesses for environmentalists. Only one federal judge gave any space in her opinions to

the opposing views of a professor testifying on behalf of the timber industry. Ninth

Circuit appellate panels provided strong support for the rulings of Judge Dwyer and other

district court judges (see Swedlow 2002a, 2003). Moreover, they did their own very

significant boundary-work very early in the litigation. Before any fact-finding had been

done by the lower courts, a Ninth Circuit panel asserted that Bird experts generally

agreed that the continued logging of old growth fir would probably exterminate the

56
species in the logged off areas.21 This suggested that those who disagreed either were

not bird experts or held marginal, minority views within the scientific community.

Further Testing and Developing this Cultural Theory of Co-production

This paper has argued that Douglass cultural theory is a good candidate for

specifying, explaining, and predicting the political cultural conditions under which the

co-production of science, institutions, and public policy and scientific, cultural,

institutional, and policy change, are likely to occur. The plausibility of this theory was

suggested here by showing how scientists involved in struggles over land and wildlife

management in the Pacific Northwest championed opposing constructs and policies

predicted by the theory. Moreover, as the cultural theory of change predicts, these

constructs and policies and the hierarchical culture and organization of their associated

institution, the Forest Service, were transformed in an egalitarian direction by new

understandings of older forests and their associated species, like the northern spotted owl,

that were co-produced by scientists, environmentalists, and federal judges. Identities,

institutions, discourses, and representations were major pathways for co-production, as

anticipated by Jasanoff, and they took forms and changed for reasons and in ways

predicted by cultural theorists. Finally, re-casting Douglass theory as a theory of

boundaries, this paper showed how boundary-work relying on pollution and purity claims

were used by cultural combatants to align themselves and the domain of authoritative

science with scientists whose constructs of nature and public policy were functional for

their preferred social and institutional relations, while excluding scientists from

subcultures and from the domain of authoritative science whose constructs and policies

were not functional for these relations.

57
 While heuristic or interpretive uses of cultural theory are probably particularly

well-suited for studying co-production because co-productive processes often

simultaneously constitute variables and cause them to act on each other (Jasanoff 2004,

274-278), making it difficult to specify variables for analysis a priori, interpretive case

studies of the kind undertaken here (and typically used in science studies) can and

probably should feed into advancing a more rigorous operationalization and testing of

cultural theorys claims. Recent efforts to operationalize and test cultural theory through

surveys, content analysis, and experiments can be found in a recent symposium (in PS:

Political Science & Politics, fall 2011) and should provide ways to build on similar

efforts cited in this article (Ellis and Thompson 1997; Porknoy and Schanz 2003) and in

the bibliography to Wildavsky 2006.

There are also several additional ways to test and develop this cultural theory of

co-production using interpretive case studies. First, one might study other

opportunistically selected cases of co-production, both to establish further the theorys

plausibility and to develop it, laying the foundation for more systematic testing and

theory development. Existing case studies of co-production could be examined for

evidence that co-production takes the forms and makes changes for the reasons predicted

by cultural theorists. Existing case studies applying cultural theory could be examined to

see whether scientists and other actors co-produce identities, institutions, discourse, and

representations in the ways predicted by Jasanoff (see the bibliography in Wildavsky

2006 for applications). To the extent these studies lack evidence to support these

investigations, their subjects could be studied further so that the claims made by co-

productionists and cultural theorists can be tested and developed.

58
 Second, the cultural theory of the co-production proposed here might be

systematically tested and developed by studying cases of co-production that are most

likely or least likely to validate the theory (a method discussed and applied to test,

invalidate, and revise a different theory in Swedlow 2009) or, third, through comparative

nested analysis of cases of co-production.

Unlike the case study methods discussed so far, comparative nested analysis will

allow scholars to make inferences about the external or general validity of the co-

production processes found in the cases studied. Seeking to exploit these methods in

related work, my collaborators and I have constructed a universe of nearly 3000

environmental, health, safety, and other risks and are studying a random, representative

sample of them (Hammitt et al 2005; Swedlow et al 2009, 2011). Among other things,

nested analysis of these risks will allow testing and development of theories of science in

the regulatory process (Swedlow 2006c), including the cultural theory of co-production

proposed and hopefully made plausible by this article.

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Figure 1. Dimensions of Culture, Patterns of Social

Relations, and Political Values

68
Figure 2. Dimensions of Culture, Patterns of Social

Relations, Political Values, and Constructs of Nature

69
Notes

1
Brickman and colleagues, while focusing on national differences in the regulation of

chemicals, inadvertently also suggest how ideology, interests, and institutions differently

interact with and influence science to produce regulatory differences.

2
However, Douglass theory is not developed here for the internal study of scientists in

their laboratories. It is instead used to specify (1) when (and which) societal interests will

become important in constituting scientific communities and constructing nature, and (2)

when (and which) constructs of nature (and scientists) will become important in

destroying culture that is, important in bringing about cultural change.

3
As Gieryn (1999, 14) further notes: To the victors go the spoils of successful cultural

cartography: not only do their claims become real enough for others to act on them, not

only is their authority to make truth provisionally sustained, but they enjoy (for awhile

anyway) the soaring esteem, cascading influence, and possibly abundant material

resources (cash, equipment, bodies-and-minds) needed to make still more truthful tales.
4
He does not even explicitly define culture, although, implicitly, he appears to accept

anthropologist Clifford Geertzs definition of culture as symbolic systems of signification

[verify], noting that My book is just a sociological follow-up to Geertzs suggestion that

there is a great deal more to sayabouthow thought provinces are demarcated,

further noting that Geertz thought that To analyze symbol use as social action isand

exceedingly difficult business, requiring one to attend to such muscular matters as the

representation of authority, the marking of boundaries (4; footnote 7).

3
Thomas Gieryn, Boundaries of Science, Handbook of Science and Technology

Studies, 440.

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6
By the extent of collectivization, I mean the extent to which those in a pattern of social

relations make Us versus Them distinctions, i.e., the extent to which the pattern is defined

by an external group boundary. By the extent of individual autonomy, I mean the extent

to which individuals in a pattern of social relations are free from coercion and are free to

act as they please; individual autonomy implies some personal power or efficacy. The

following description of Douglass cultural theory tracks that found in Thompson et al

(1990) fairly closely. However, I have relabeled their dimensions to make their theory

translate better into terms that social scientists already understand. Thus, the extent of

collectivization in a social organization corresponds to the extent of group in their

formulation, while the extent of individual autonomy corresponds (inversely) to the

extent of grid.
7
These characterizations of appropriate decision-making authority are adapted from

Lotte Jensen 1999.

8
Thompson claims nature resilient is a meta-myth that subsumes the other four

constructs of nature (Thompson et al 1990, 26, 29-32).

9
Thompson calls this nature perverse/tolerant (Schwarz and Thompson 1990, 9).
10
Industry consulting biologist Robert Vincent, for example, emphasized that The owl

has a remarkable ability to fly long distances in search of habitat and an untapped

potential to adapt (quoted in Yaffee 1994, 52).

11
See Figure 4 in Thompson et al 1990, 71, for a typology of cultural changes; see also

Wildavsky 2006b [1985] and Lockhart 1997.

71
12
But a successor group, The Wildlands Project, relied significantly on conservation

biology to argue that half of the U.S. should be returned to its wild pre-Columbian

condition (www.wildlandsproject.org).
13
The paper was published three years later (Franklin et al 1981).
14
Forsmans adviser, Howard Wight, was simultaneously chairman of the department of

wildlife sciences and director of a special research unit of the US Fish and Wildlife

Service at Oregon State University (Chase 1995, 133; Yaffee, 1994, 15-19; as discussed

in Cite author 2003, 191-92).

15
The Sierra Club, for example, was so eager to disassociate itself from SCLDF that it

sued SCLDF for trademark infringement, which caused SCLDF to have to rename itself

Earth Justice.
16
These are not the only ways that Douglass concepts of pollution and purity can be

extended to the study of science. Related but different uses can be found in Bloor (1978,

1982), Bloomfield and Vurdubakis (1995), and Mody (2001).

17
Science is not all of a piece, Bloor writes, echoing Gieryn. It is subject to a duality

of nature which (sic) is signalised by many distinctions, e.g., that between pure and

applied, science and technology, theory and practice, popular and serious, routine and

fundamental. In general we may say that knowledge has its sacred aspects and its profane

side Its sacred aspect is whatever we deem to be highest in it [T]he sacred aspects of

science can be thought of as informing or guiding the more mundane, less inspired, less

vital parts.
18
The so-called Thomas Committee or Interagency Scientific Committee (ISC) was

created by Congress as part of Northwest Timber Compromise legislation to assess the

72
owls population decline and habitat needs and to develop a plan to protect it (Thomas, et

al., 1990).
19
The reference here is to President Clintons subsequent decision to appoint Jack Ward

Thomas, the wildlife research biologist he had appointed to head FEMAT, to head the

U.S. Forest Service.

20
Seattle Audubon Society v. Evans, 771 F.Supp. 1081, at 1091-93 (W.D. Wash. 1991).
21
Portland Audubon Society v. Hodel, 866 F.2d 302, at 305 (9th Cir. 1989).

73