Organizing Synthetic Biology: Structuring the Social and the Technical

• In Event: Organizational Communication Research Escalator - Extended Session

Abstract

Organizational Communication research has increasingly attended to the role of communication in creating, interpreting, and reifying policies. Yet little of this work has considered the organizing of the genetic sciences, where the interplay of structures and actors holds physical consequences for living organisms. By focusing on the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition for synthetic biologists, this study responds to calls for Communication scholars to address the ways in which biotechnology reconstitutes bodies, routines, and ontologies. Drawing on communication as constitutive of organization theory and its predecessor, structuration theory, I investigate how iGEM participants structure what is technical versus social, what is responsible versus irresponsible, what is acceptable versus unacceptable, and why. In addition to contributing to a broader effort to rematerialize organizational communication, this project demonstrates how the interactions of early-career synthetic biologists and their mentors relate to ongoing national and international negotiations regarding the regulation of synthetic biology.

Author

• Elizabeth Pitts, North Carolina State University