Pickering, A. (1993) ‘The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science’, American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), pp. 559–589.

Pickering’s “The Mangle of Practice” reconceptualises scientific work as a temporally unfolding field in which human intentions and material agencies are reciprocally transformed. Against sociologies of science that privilege only human actors, Pickering argues that machines, instruments, substances, and experimental systems participate in practice through forms of resistance: they interrupt plans, fail to behave as expected, and force scientists to revise both goals and techniques. His central concept, the mangle, names the dialectic of resistance and accommodation through which scientific knowledge, instruments, social organisation, and human agency emerge together. The case study of Donald Glaser’s bubble chamber demonstrates this process with particular clarity. Glaser sought a denser detector for strange-particle physics, but each experimental configuration produced unforeseen failures: substances did not register tracks, triggers failed, and xenon chambers initially produced no usable results. These resistances were not merely errors; they redirected practice, generated new explanatory accounts, and reshaped the material form of the instrument. Accommodation occurred through technical adjustment, conceptual reinterpretation, and changes in scientific ambition, including the movement from cosmic-ray work towards accelerator-based research. Pickering’s argument is therefore posthumanist without erasing human intention: scientists have goals, but those goals are themselves altered through encounters with nonhuman performance. Scientific practice is neither determined by social interests nor dictated by nature alone; it is an emergent choreography of people, machines, plans, failures, and adaptations. The essay concludes that science must be understood as performative becoming rather than as the simple production of representations, because knowledge arises from the contingent, reciprocal mangling of human and material agency.