Paper long abstract:

Clinical trials have gained much authority in establishing the safety and efficacy of drugs, medical appliances and medical procedures. Furthermore, along with the rise in numbers, clinical trials have been moving outside of Europe and North America to other settings. In this paper I draw on the social worlds/arenas framework, advanced by such scholars as Susan Leigh Star, Adele E. Clark and Joan Fujimura, to analyse what has happened after the practice of clinical trials arrived to a Russian research centre at the beginning of the 1990s. Using interviews with various actors involved in preforming trials at the centre, documents analysis and participant observation, I show how clinical trials conduct becomes a boundary process. This process enfolds at the intersections of the participating social worlds of investigators, patients, industry, healthcare professionals and regulatory authorities, which come to form a relatively stable arena. I examine how clinical trials conduct reorders social worlds by enabling novel relations, commitments and ways to meet needs of different actors in the trial arena, thus, allowing for continuous production of biomedical knowledge.

Analysing trials conduct through social worlds/arenas framework allows to reveal the complex, often locally specific relations and arrangements between multiple social worlds. It, thus, helps show how and why various kinds of work in science and technology are done. It also brings attention to the diversity of socio-political circumstances including differences in power and resources underlying the globalising clinical research enterprise.