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Paper short abstract

This article analyzes how microbiomedical companies institutionalize microbiome science by blending new scientific repertoires with familiar cultural frameworks, translating complex lab knowledge into everyday practices and understanding while sacrificing some of its radical epistemic claims.

Paper long abstract

Growing recognition of human–microbe interdependence has produced a major epistemic shift in understandings of the body and the self, reframing humans as homo microbis--complex biomolecular networks constituted through ongoing human–microbe relations. This reconceptualization carries significant political implications, as microbes are recast as active agents in domains such as sociality, economic behavior, and racial identity. Capitalizing on these developments, a rapidly expanding microbiomedical industry has been offering products and services that claim to optimize symbiotic human–microbe relationships. These companies have been criticized for their careless representation of microbiome science and overstating its potential for improving consumers' health and quality of life. In this article, we draw on an extensive analysis of the public discourse of 25 microbiomedical companies to argue that such a distortion of microbiome science is an integral part of its social institutionalization process. Focusing on the commodification of microbiome science, and drawing on the sociology of culture, we show how companies respond to epistemic instability by blending emergent scientific repertoires with established cultural frameworks. In this process, companies discard the "homo-microbis" model but retain the agentic--and politically consequential--role of microbes across multiple life domains. This hybridization enables firms to embed the new scientific paradigm within familiar systems of meaning and value, and to recruit their consumers into the often-laborious practical production of microbiomedical knowledge itself. We argue that this process facilitates the translation of microbiomedical science from specialized laboratory procedures into everyday social routines and a broader public understanding.