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There was a time when the mobilization of experts was a taken-for-prated. unproblematic aspect of decision-making processes. That confidence has vanished. Ascertaining the significance of expertise now requires a reconsideration of the dynamics of controversies. The current view still assimilates conlroversy to the medieval exercise of the disputatio in which two parties argue one against the other. A non-reductionist view is needed to take fully into account the diversity of worlds of relevance involved in the dynamics of any public controversy. Only then is it possible to understand how decision making is predicated upon associations of worlds of relevance, and how expertise is actually a collective learning process which sets the boundary conditions for the efficacy of individual experts.

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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 posteriori examination of public documents. In this paper, we resort to 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. 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.