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Book Review
| Global Institutions and Social Knowledge: Generating Research at the Scripps Institution and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, 1900s–1990s. By Virginia M. Walsh. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. xvi + 171 pp. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $20.00.
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| It is deeply unfortunate that Virginia Walsh died before she could finish her study of how institutions and institutional players shape and create scientific knowledge. By posthumously publishing her work, Sandeep Prasada has allowed us to see at least where she was heading in her thoughts about the interaction between knowledge production, belief creation, and institutional agents. |
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Walsh focuses on the roles that Scripps Institution of Oceanography played in U.S. relations to the sea from the 1900s to the 1990s, correctly highlighting the ontological questions that arise in oceanographic research. Arguing for an "institutional approach" that navigates between neorealist and interest-group analytical schools in current international relations literature, she borrows from both political science theory and new constructivist trends in the history of science. She argues, "Human beliefs about environmental problems—whether they exist, how severe they are—shape human action. To understand social action, therefore, we must develop some explanation as to how people, either individually or in groups, form beliefs." For Walsh, the explanation comes from analyzing how three forms of "fixes"—the positional fix, the statutory fix, and the committee fix—allowed Scripps to affect and shape their investigations of the oceans throughout the twentieth century. |
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