Fields Theory
To begin, I draw on fields theory, an analytic approach (Martin 2003: 24) that highlights the importance of analyzing the forces and struggles within fields (Bourdieu 1996, 1998, 2004).19 Recent writing on strategic action fields directs analytic attention to four aspects of a field: (1) a diffuse understanding of what is going on in the field, that is, what is at stake (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992); (2) sets of actors in the field who possess more or less power; (3) a set of shared understandings about the rules of the field, or how “the game” is legitimately played; (4) an interpretive frame that individual and collective actors use to make sense of activity within the field (Fligstein & McAdam 2011: 4).
In this particular case, a big part of what is at stake is the ability to make legitimate and robust claims about the causes of environmental health and illness.20 As such, among the questions explored in the following analysis are:
What are the rules of the field? Who has the technical capacity and the social power to speak and act legitimately in this domain (Bourdieu 1975: 19)? What kinds of capital govern status within the field?
What hierarchies exist among actors in the field? Who are the dominant players? That is, which actors have managed to impose a definition of science that says that its highest realization “consists in having, being, doing, what they have, are, and do . . . ” (Bourdieu 2004: 63)? What options are available to scientists whose research is seen as inferior? How might actors endeavor to define good science in ways that will benefit them by increasing the value of the kind of science they do?
What is the subjective structure, or habitus, that social actors within the field acquire through participation in it (Bourdieu 1996)?21 What “possibilities and impossibilities” are thereby “offered to their dispositions” (Bourdieu 2004: 36)?
Recent writing on strategic action fields has emphasized also the importance of the broader field environment, or what I call an arena.22 As noted by Fligstein and McAdam, “virtually all of the work on fields focuses only on the internal workings of these orders, depicting them as largely self-contained, autonomous worlds.” However, fields do not exist in a vacuum; relationships and boundaries with other fields are often powerful parts of a field’s developmental history (Fligstein & McAdam 2012: 59). Insofar as we fail to attend to the ties that link fields to each other—and to the arenas (or broader field environment) in which they are located—we constrain our ability to understand field dynamics, “including the potential for conflict and change in any given field” (Fligstein & McAdam 2011:8). It is especially important to understand the relationships between a given field and that subset of state and nonstate fields on which it routinely is exposed.23
A central consideration is the extent to which the field is independent from demands—or shocks—from actors and/or events outside the field. Against the assumption that scientific fields are always “autonomous and isolated,” with changes in science driven primarily by dynamics internal to the field (Albert & Kleinman 2011; 267; Mialet 2003; see also Bourdieu 1975: 29), I seek to investigate empirically conflicts regarding the autonomy and legitimacy of specific forms of knowledge production.24 In so doing, I demonstrate that in the environmental health arena, scientific claims, the struggle for scientific authority, and ongoing political and economic concerns have become deeply intertwined.
Second, my work draws on the insights of institutional theory regarding how fields are constituted and may be reconstituted through patterns of institutional interactions and relations.25 Neoinstitutional theory also focuses on fields but conceives of them more broadly as “those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other agencies that produce similar services and products” (DiMaggio & Powell 1983: 148). Neoinstitutional theory posits that the structure of fields is a consequence of the requirements and demands of the state, the structure of the professions, and competition for resources, political power, and institutional legitimacy. Most broadly, an institutional approach to the sociology of science attends to the “rules and routines, organizations, and resource distributions that shape knowledge production systems” (Frickel & Moore 2006: 7).
Historically, scholars in this tradition also have asked questions about two different, if often interrelated, forms of institutional change. First, scholars have investigated the processes through which institutions come to resemble each other, identifying mechanisms of isomorphic change such as coercion (a consequence of political influence and problems of legitimacy), mimesis (by which institutions copy each other in an effort to manage uncertainty), and norms that are established and transmitted through professional networks (Schneiberg & Clemens 2006). Second, and related, they have asked questions about the diffusion of innovations, behavioral strategies and organizational structures, and their adoption (Strang & Soule 1998: 268). Research on diffusion points to the importance of structural mechanisms, such as social networks and reference groups (Burt 1987; Granovetter 1973; Simmons, Dobbin, & Garrett 2008; Strang & Soule 1998). At the same time, sociologists describe diffusion as a deeply cultural process; for example, the cultural understanding that organizations or institutions belong to a common social category may provide the basis for a tie between them (Strang & Meyer 1993: 490–492). As we will see, both the competition and the connections between NIH institutes, such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and NIEHS, and between regulatory agencies, especially the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and EPA, have motivated, constrained, enabled, and been reshaped by the diffusion of molecular genetic and genomic techniques.26
Viewed through these theoretical lenses—and, as highlighted by the scientists whom I interviewed—the environmental health sciences faced myriad challenges in the waning decades of the twentieth century. I detail these challenges in the following chapters. In brief, they include the relative lack of autonomy of the environmental health sciences as a field,27 ongoing challenges to and critiques of environmental epidemiology and toxicology in controversies over risk assessment and regulation, the rising power of genetic (versus all other) explanations for human health and illness, and growing concern that specific institutions of environmental health research—including the NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NTP)—were losing status, funding, and political support. My argument in this book is that research on gene-environment interaction, with its focus inside the human body and at the molecular level, has been compelling to environmental health scientists precisely insofar as it offers a diverse array of strategies for meeting these challenges.28
Strategies and Consequences
Environmental health scientists had choices about how they responded to these challenges, and the decision to take up research on gene-environment interaction was not without risks. I ask ”How did environmental health scientists, as “skilled social actors” (Fligstein 2001), perceive, evaluate, and pursue this particular strategy for strengthening their field, garnering resources for their institutions, protecting their professional jurisdiction, and doing important and meaningful scientific research, as they understand it?29 To answer this question, the subsequent chapters take up also the following topics:
What motivated environmental health scientists to make gene-environment interaction a defining focus of their research?
How did environmental health scientists build a coalition around the idea that understanding gene-environment interaction is integral to disease prevention and