Knorr Cetina’s
(1999, p. 27) definition of laboratory practice as
‘‘the detachment of objects from their natural
environment and their installation in a new phenomenal
field defined by social agents’’ emphasizes
that laboratories can encompass not just the activities
of science, but also the production and legitimization
of knowledge produced in fields nottypically seen as scientific. By discussing psychoanalysis,
cathedral building and war games, Knorr
Cetina (1992) stresses that in knowledge production,
laboratories and experiments take place in
everyday life as well as in self-consciously scientific
sites.