Cyrus Mody: Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology

Abstract

Cyrus Mody's fascinating new book on the development of probe microcroscopy is an essential read for anyone interested in technology evolution, commercialization of university research, the emergence of new organizational forms, or the creation of the field of nanotechnology. In it, he documents several decades of the development of an essential tool enabling nanotechnology-scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs)-as well as other related probe technologies. In doing so, Mody details how innovation in technology is mixed with innovation in organizational forms and how organizations, disciplines, and networked communities interact in the shaping of a field.While Mody was trained (at Cornell) as a science and technology studies (STS) scholar, he is well read in the management of technology and organizational theory literatures and uses this book as an experiment in linking STS methods and theories to those in fields closer to home for the typical reader of the Administrative Science Quarterly. The interpenetration of these fields has yet to get much traction (though see recent work by Kaplan andRadin, 2011, andBerman, 2008, for studies linking STS and neoinstitutional theory), but Mody's book is a clear demonstration of the potential value. Chapter 1 offers a well-written and evocative summary of the book's arguments in each of the subsequent chapters, and if you were pressed for time, you could get away with just reading these initial pages. But if you did, you would be missing rich descriptions of the unfolding of this field that, in their details, offer deep insight into the mechanisms of field emergence as well as technology commercialization, insights that challenge many of the understandings in management research today. The story of STMs not only elucidates but also provokes a long series of new research questions.Based on a multiyear ethnography of an STM lab, more than 150 interviews with inventors and users of STMs, and a painstakingly researched historical analysis, Mody engagingly provides a blow-by-blow description of the development of this scientific and technological field. He offers clear explanations of the science that make the developments readily understandable to the nonscientist reader. This careful grounding in the technical details allows him to show, without any elusive handwaving, the relationship between the material aspects of the instruments and the social aspects of the development of the instrumental community.The book proceeds mainly chronologically, starting with the invention of the STM. Chapter 2 not only offers an account of how the STM's inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer in IBM's Zurich labs, ''cannily'' mobilized academic