Co-Production Analysis
Also known as: Co-production idiom, Co-productionist analysis, Knowledge and social order analysis
Co-production analysis applies the 'idiom of co-production' developed by Sheila Jasanoff: the claim that the ways we know the world are inseparable from the ways we choose to live in it. Scientific knowledge and social order are not produced in separate spheres that later interact; they are produced together. Co-production analysis traces this simultaneous making of natural and social facts—how a new way of knowing nature is bound up with new identities, institutions, discourses, and representations that together stabilise both knowledge and political order.
Key highlights
- Dissolves the unproductive 'did science cause politics or vice versa?' debate by treating knowledge and order as jointly produced.
- The four instruments—identities, institutions, discourses, representations—offer a concrete, comparable analytic toolkit for otherwise diffuse interpretive claims.
- Powerfully illuminates governance, expertise, and legitimacy controversies where facts and values are deeply entangled.
- Supports rich cross-national comparison, showing how different political cultures co-produce different knowledges of the 'same' phenomenon.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use co-production analysis when an issue cannot be understood by separating its scientific and political dimensions—where authority, legitimacy, and identity are at stake alongside facts—such as risk regulation, environmental and biomedical controversy, emerging technologies, and expertise in public life. It suits interpretive, comparative, and historical work with rich documentary, legal, and ethnographic sources. It assumes that knowledge and order are mutually constitutive and that the analyst's task is to render their joint making visible rather than to adjudicate the science. It is less appropriate when you need to evaluate a scientific claim's validity, when causal attribution between science and politics is the goal, or when only thin or aggregate quantitative data are available.
Strengths & limitations
- Dissolves the unproductive 'did science cause politics or vice versa?' debate by treating knowledge and order as jointly produced.
- The four instruments—identities, institutions, discourses, representations—offer a concrete, comparable analytic toolkit for otherwise diffuse interpretive claims.
- Powerfully illuminates governance, expertise, and legitimacy controversies where facts and values are deeply entangled.
- Supports rich cross-national comparison, showing how different political cultures co-produce different knowledges of the 'same' phenomenon.
- As an interpretive 'idiom' rather than a fixed theory or procedure, it can be hard to operationalise and to falsify.
- Its symmetrical refusal to privilege science or politics can be read as evading normative judgement about which knowledge claims are better.
- Demanding deep historical, legal, and ethnographic immersion, it is resource-intensive and difficult to scale or replicate.
- The breadth of the four instruments can invite loose application in which almost anything is described as 'co-produced'.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What is the difference between constitutive and interactional co-production?
Constitutive co-production concerns the emergence of genuinely new natural and social kinds together—how, for example, a new scientific object and the social categories and institutions that recognise it come into being at the same time. Interactional co-production concerns the ongoing, recurrent ways that already-established domains of knowledge and social order shape, contest, and adjust to one another. Jasanoff uses the distinction to separate questions of how orders are born from questions of how they are continually maintained and negotiated.
What are the four 'instruments' or pathways of co-production?
Jasanoff identifies making identities, making institutions, making discourses, and making representations as the principal sites through which knowledge and social order are co-produced. They are not a checklist but interlocking pathways: new knowledge confers identities, is embedded in institutions, is carried by discourses, and is made visible by representations, and these mutually stabilise both the knowledge and the order it underwrites.
How does co-production relate to sociotechnical imaginaries?
Sociotechnical imaginaries, developed by Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, are a direct descendant of the co-production idiom. Imaginaries—collectively held visions of desirable futures attainable through science and technology—are one powerful mechanism through which knowledge and social order are co-produced, linking the four instruments to shared futures and national projects. Co-production is the broader framework; imaginaries analysis is a more focused programme within it.
Sources
- 1.Jasanoff, S. (Ed.). (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. Routledge.ISBN 9780415403290
- 2.Jasanoff, S. (2004). Ordering knowledge, ordering society. In S. Jasanoff (Ed.), States of Knowledge (pp. 13-45). Routledge.ISBN 9780415403290
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Co-Production Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/science-technology-studies/co-production-sts-analysis