And while laboratories seem on the one hand to be the pinnacle of objective science-highly controlled, hermetically closed spaces, magic-carpet-fact-generators that float above the din and disorder of culture-they in fact import whole worldviews and systems of assumptions that become a tacit part of their everyday functioning. They inherit their ways of working from other practitioners past and present (mentors, colleagues and competitors), and are moreover symbols of the growth and power of the discipline (Capshew, 1992, 132).
They garner funds and grow the profession but also direct research with increasing inertia in particular directions. In this way labs exercise both a catalytic and normalizing function over the field (Kuhn, 1996, 23-42). They attract funding (to the lab and the university), if the lab produces reliable results and this selective process in turn shapes the sorts of future questions that can be reliably asked and answered. Labs are assemblages of equipment and trained personnel, coordinated in specific ways to ask very particular questions of the world. We should not forget the power of the laboratory itself to shape a discipline and perpetuate certain ways of knowing.
