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This article replies to Steve Woolgar's and Geoff Cooper's (W&C) study on urban legends, in this case, referring to Winner's Moses-story. They proposed that the bridge-story is itself a dynamic, shifting and essentially inconcludable narrative, a form of urban legend. Before addressing some of the points W&C raise, the author likes to make clear that his case against Winner was not about the referential adequacy of the bridge-story. However, to be able to make his point, the author has to raise the issue of referentiality. His case against Winner is twofold: 1) that parables should be handled with care in teaching social science, and; 2) that what Winner asserts about technical artefacts is doubtful for any technical artefact, not only for Moses' low bridges.

The article discusses about how does ethnography fare in theoretical physics in response to opinion of authors George Gale and Cassandra L. Pinnick. One of Gale and Pinnick's main points about the limitation of ethnography, when it is confronted with a maximally theoretical science, derives from the lateralmindedness. The ethnography of theoretical theory in physics poses challenges of observability, comprehensibility and relevance to social studies of science. But it also offers the possibility of pursuing and exemplifying a distinctive version of ethnography. The article focuses on W-algebras, BRST-operators, third order polynomials, Fock spaces, and Virasoro cohomologies. Ethnography, one believes, ought to strive for thick description for registering and decoding the layers of meaning that create cultural behavior, like the layers of food that create a sandwich. Thick description exploits modes of interpretation as a way of transforming mundane activities into analytically rich forms of life. But the view of ethnographers as those who preferably bring home thick descriptions that are interpretative decodings of densely layered cultural texts also has its drawbacks.

The article presents information for the scholars who are interested to contribute research papers in this journal and the journal's policies regarding the acceptance of such papers. It is informed that the journal "Social Studies of Science" is devoted mainly to the results of original research, whether empirical or theoretical, which brings fresh light to bear on the concepts, processes, mediations and consequences of modern science and technology. It encourages appropriate contributions from political science, sociology, economics, history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, social anthropology, and the legal and educational disciplines. It welcomes studies of fundamental research, applied research and development of industrial science and other miscellaneous fields. It is further clarified that the general implications of any paper's findings should be clearly indicated. If authors are confident that their draft papers satisfy these criteria, then they should consider submission to this journal. However, if it is found that an essentially similar paper is under simultaneous review for possible publication elsewhere, the paper will not be published in this journal.

The article focuses on views of sociologists Harry Collins, Stefan Hirschauer and Peter Winch on ethnography, exoticism, surgery, antisepsis and de-horsification. For Collins, ethnography involves a relationship between two internal states, the observer's subjective understanding of exotic beliefs and practices, and actual experience of members of the group studied. Scientific frame of mind requires an orientation to something outside oneself. Collins may be hanging his vision of social science on a logical frame that is ill-suited to comprehending radically different epistemic activities on and beyond science. Hirschauer's ethnography differs profoundly from the traditional image of confrontation between a scientific observer and members of a primitive culture.

This article presents an ethnography of Quebec Science Policy. It adopts an ethnographic approach in order to study how the science and technology staff of the Quebec Government, starting in 1981, went about devising policy measures as part of what they saw as a general science policy framework for biotechnology. In recent years, the sociology of science has been profoundly renewed by the use of an ethnographic approach to the study of scientific practice. The same cannot be said of science policy studies. Only a limited number of authors have studied in detail the construction and application of particular science policy programmes, and their contributions are mostly based on the a posterior examination of public documents. Science policy practices, at least at that stage, appear to be first and foremost representational practices grounded in particular kinds of literary activities characterized by an extended intertextual web. In such a framework, the native category of file or dossier plays a central role, allowing for the basic classificatory operations in which representations are grounded.