Produire l'objectivité médicale : un système expérimental réplicatif de standardisation1

As seen through studies in medical sociology and though the concerns expressed by health-care professionals, standardizing medical practices is the key to the theoretical and practical thought devoted to the production of scientific objectivity. Till present, analyses have given a special place to the conditions for establishing innovative systems of medical coordination on a large scale. Recent studies have focused on constructing standards and concretely applying them to the coordination of medical practices. Under this paradigm however, maintaining standardized practices over time is taken for granted. Attention has mainly turned toward the visible aspects of standardization in a narrowly defined medical setting with, as a result, models that are based on the degree of standardization obtained instead of on the process of attaining it. Two empirical studies are used to raise questions about how to make the nascent medical/administrative objectivity last. This presentation of a “style of standardization” pleads for a pragmatic approach to the producing of standards so as to describe the various innovative forms of standardized practices without necessarily making presuppositions about the context of discovery or the properties inherent in what is to be standardized.