Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (ISBN 0-674-79291-2) is a seminal book by French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour first published in 1987.

It is written in a textbook style, proposes an approach to the empirical study of science and technology, and is considered a canonical application of actor-network theory.

[citation needed] It also entertains ontological conceptions and theoretical discussions making it a research monograph and not a methodological handbook per se.

That is, when a series of instructions are too complicated to be repeated all the time, a black box is drawn around it, allowing it to function only by giving it "input" and "output" data.

[3] However, there were some critics of it such as Olga Amsterdamska's who stated in a book review: "Somehow, the ideal of a social science whose only goal is to tell inconsistent, false, and incoherent stories about nothing in particular does not strike me as very appealing or sufficiently ambitious.