Latour manages a book that is both highly theoretical and intensely detailed. Written at one of the high points of the post-modern turn in STS, and deeply involved in the Strong Programme to explain successful and unsuccessful science in the same way, Laboratory Life shows how abstruse theory and ethnography can mutually support each other. Latour spent 21 months as a participant-observer in a neuro-endocrinology lab, and from his time develops a comprehensive picture of the scientific process as an act of rhetorical destruction--eliminating alternatives until only one is left, scientists as economic-strategic actors seeking to increase their stock of 'credit' in the community, and science as a difficult struggle to make Order out of Chaos.

It's interesting seeing the evolution of Latour's thought from Laboratory Life to Science in Action to We Have Never Been Modern. You see facticity as an historical construct assembled out of a whole textus of inscriptions, but the later Latour dropped the idea of 'credit' as a reward (perhaps it is not analytic enough, but to me, it does describe the difference between a decent scholar and great one), and the whole notion of We Have Never Been Modern, that the Enlightenment goal of separating the world of science from the world of politics, and the world of humans from the world of nature is doomed to failure, is not yet evident. Though Latour still makes it very clear how contextual science is, in this book at least, he seems to believe that the work of science might yet succeed in making the entire world legible.