Abstract Summary
Handbooks and manuals are where the knowledge and practices of a discipline accumulate. In their use, professional standards can be disseminated and enforced. But even in their rejection handbooks be used to construct disciplinary boundaries. This paper offers a historical example documenting the tenuousness of a manual’s authority and role as an instrument of professionalization. In the early twentieth century, disciplinary boundaries were being created within the larger field of industrial chemistry. Denouncing the use of manuals, pejoratively termed “cook books,” helped to solidify professional prestige among individual or groups of industrial chemists through the exclusion of chemical technicians, in part along gendered lines. The rejection of “cook books” for use in research or industry soon extended into a rejection of their use for education. Although handbooks are no longer an object of common contention among scientists, the term “cook book laboratory” has lasted to the present day among science education reformers.
