Repetition Strain Injury in Australia: Medical Knowledge, Social Movement, and De Facto Partisanship* GABRIELE BAMMER, Australian National University BRIAN MARTIN, University of Wollongong One of the most vehement debates over medical knowledge in Australia in the 1980s concerned "repetition strain injury" or RSI. This paper analyzes the Australian RSI experience using two contrasting approaches: the sociology of medical knowledge and social problems as social movements. Each approach tends to delegitimate the position that RSI is work-related and has an organic basis. A key factor leading to the de facto partisanship associated with each approach is the choice to analyze the Australian RSI experience in the first place. The de facto partisanship associated with the choice of a framework of analysis and issue to study is an important aspect of understanding social problems, an aspect which has been largely ignored until now. In recent debates about the appropriate approach to studying social problems, three posi- tions can be identified. First is the "objectivist" approach, in which the existence of social problems is viewed as a consequence of real, knowable social conditions. Objectivist analysts do not attempt to provide a social explanation of social reality, since this reality is thought to be known as objective fact. In a second approach, strict social constructionism, no assump- tions are made about objective realities. Rather, the analyst studies the social activities of actors, especially those by which the actors define certain things as "social problems"-a pro- cess called claims-making. A third, intermediate approach, termed "contextual construction- ism" (Best 1989b), acknowledges making some claims about social reality, and uses these as a framework for analyzing the social processes of claims-making. This categorization of course simplifies the diversity of approaches found in the social problems field, but suffices for the purpose of informing our study. The important point is that proponents of each approach claim a methodological superiority linked to assumptions about the reality of what is being studied. Whatever approach they adopt, social problems analysts typically present themselves as social scientists, not as partisans for a particular viewpoint. Our concern here is the process, which we term de facto partisanship, by which analysts may prejudge their conclusions by their choice of analytic framework. According to constructionists, objectivists prejudge their conclusions through their assumptions about social reality because they do not attempt a so- cial explanation of this reality. Woolgar and Pawluch (1985a) extended this critique to many ostensibly constructionist analyses, pointing out that while analysts subjected some claims to scrutiny, others went unexamined and hence were essentially treated as objective; they called this process "ontological gerrymandering." In both objectivist and contextual constructionist analyses, greater credibility is imputed to the views treated as objective, thereby often provid- ing de facto-and sometimes open-support for those views. This sort of partisanship is not * Useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper were received from Ilse Blignault, Dorothy Broom, Phyll Dance, Merrelyn Emery, Andrew Hopkins, David Legge, John McCallum, Armand Mauss, Jan Reid, Pam Scott, Janis Shaw, Terry Stokes, Roslyn Woodward, and several anonymous reviewers. Stefanie Pearce provided valuable assistance with production of the paper. Correspondence to: Martin, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Locked Bag 8844, South Coast Mail Centre NSW 2521, Australia. SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 39, No. 3, August 1992 219