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The surveillance of cellular scientists' practice

Lewis, Jamie Thornton ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1065-6017 and Atkinson, Paul Anthony ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7367-8160 2011. The surveillance of cellular scientists' practice. BioSocieties 6 (4) , pp. 381-400. 10.1057/biosoc.2011.18

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Abstract

We discuss a set of practices surrounding the creation of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) performed within a cell laboratory. This process exemplifies a wider imperative to render visible the work of laboratory science. The creation of visibly accountable practices in turn reflects and reinforces the wider trend towards standardisation of cell practice. Standards themselves have thus become some of the artefacts created in laboratories, biobanks and other sites of biomedical work. Such processes of visibility and accountability translate the local, craft practices of laboratory work – often tacitly performed and transmitted – into explicit forms of knowledge production and regulation. Where once, however, laboratory work depended to a large degree on trust, newer modes of regulation impose new layers of mutual surveillance. Visibility is enhanced through technologies of inspection and surveillance, by increased volumes of self-documentation and by the imposition of regulatory protocols. Together these transform what was once implicit in the working practices of trusted professionals into explicitly accountable practices. Therefore the achievement of GMP accreditation is one example of the current imperative towards reflexive-accountability where new trans(national) monitoring technologies create new regimes of surveillance in biomedical science.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Medicine
Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords: tissue; surveillance; standards; regulation; trust; visibility
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISSN: 1745-8552
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 30 March 2016
Last Modified: 11 Oct 2023 21:43
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/40506

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