Star and Griesemer’s analysis demonstrates that scientific knowledge is not produced through absolute consensus, but through the pragmatic coordination of heterogeneous social worlds. Their study of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology shows that science operates as a complex institutional ecology in which professionals, amateur naturalists, patrons, administrators, collectors, fieldworkers and biological materials participate in the same enterprise while retaining divergent motives, languages and expectations. The crucial problem is therefore not how to eliminate difference, but how to render difference productive. This is achieved through two interdependent mechanisms: methodological standardisation and boundary objects. The former disciplines the collection, labelling, preservation and circulation of specimens, allowing information gathered by non-specialists to become scientifically reliable. The latter refers to entities that are sufficiently flexible to acquire distinct meanings across different communities, yet sufficiently robust to preserve a recognisable identity between them. Specimens, maps, field notes, forms and museum repositories thus become mediating artefacts: for the scientist, a specimen may constitute evolutionary evidence; for the conservationist, a fragment of vanishing nature; for the collector, a practical achievement; and for the university, institutional prestige. The case of Joseph Grinnell and Annie Alexander illustrates how scientific authority emerged not by imposing a single interpretative framework, but by designing protocols capable of translating local practices into generalisable knowledge. The museum consequently functioned as a negotiated infrastructure where cooperation depended upon partial alignment rather than intellectual uniformity. Its success lay in preserving autonomy while securing comparability, enabling actors to collaborate without fully sharing the same worldview. Star and Griesemer’s central contribution is therefore to displace a linear model of scientific authority in favour of a relational account of knowledge production, where material practices, negotiated translations and durable yet adaptable objects make collective science possible.