On telling regulatory tales: rBST comes to Canada

The analysis of technoscientific regulatory controversies is now an establi shed genre within science studies, with a small but important methodologica l and meta-literature. That literature has only rarely noted how published accounts of particular controversies inevitably employ narrational strategi es, including decisions about emplotment, time-frames, character-motivation , and the use of tropes, to endow these stories with political and epistemo logical meaning. In an exercise designed to recover these narrational eleme nts and promote narrative consciousness, this paper presents two separate a ccounts of a single important controversy: Canada's recent regulatory exper ience with the Monsanto Corporation's recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST ). The discussion points out the different narrational strategies employed in each account, and analyses how these strategies interact with explicit o r theory-based interpretive approaches to determine how the accounts contri bute to 'public moral argument' about regulatory affairs. It concludes with broader speculations on the advantages that a greater reliance on narrativ e form has to offer the field of controversy-analysis and science studies i n general.