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Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation
Chiefly papers presented at a conference held at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany, in April 2003.
Risk and Morality
Collectively, the contributors explain why risk is such a key aspect of Western culture, and demonstrate that new regimes for risk management are transforming social integration, value-based reasoning and morality.
Pragmatic Inquiry
This book examines a range of critical concepts that are central to a shift in the social sciences toward "pragmatic inquiry," reflecting a twenty-first century concern with particular problems and themes rather than grand theory. Taking a transnational and transdisciplinary approach, the collection demonstrates a shared commitment to using analytical concepts for empirical exploration and a general orientation to research that favors an attention to objects, techniques, and practices. The chapters draw from broad-based and far-reaching social theory in order to analyze new, specific challenges, from grasping the everyday workings of markets, courtrooms, and clinics, to inscribing the transf...
Life Phases, Mobility and Consumption
The very routines of our daily life are to a great extent the expression of our vulnerability and dependence on incredibly wide and complex networks and socio-technical systems. Following people’s routes in the city, makes visible the differentially distributed capacities and potentials for mobility. In today’s consumer society, shopping is the kind of mundane and routine mobility that we all engage in. Yet having a first child or growing old radically changes people’s logistical habits as consumers, what the authors of this book call consumer logistics; moving from home to the store and back home again with recent purchases. Depending on the ages and number of children in the family and the condition of one’s body (physical health and strength), going shopping requires quite different settings and gear. Exploring consumer mobility through the lens of life phase and age will deepen the understanding of hitherto under-researched aspects of the ageing process, and of mobility, knowledge that is of vital importance for societies striving for sustainable mobility and sustainable cities.
The Dispositif
The notion of the dispositif (dispositive) is particularly relevant for understanding phenomena where one can observe the reproducibility of distributed technical activities, operational or discursive, between human and non-human actors. This book reviews the concept of the dispositive through various disciplinary perspectives, analyzing in turn its technical, organizational and discursive dimensions. The relations of power and visibility enrich these discussions. Regarding information and communication sciences, three main uses of this concept are presented, on the one hand to illustrate the heuristic scope of issues integrating the dispositive and, on the other hand, to demonstrate its unifying aspect in this disciplinary field. The first use concerns the complexity of media content production; the second relates to activity traces using the concept of the “secondary information dispositive”; finally, the third involves the use of the dispositive in contexts of digital participation.
Differences in Medicine
Western medicine is widely thought of as a coherent and unified field in which beliefs, definitions, and judgments are shared. This book debunks this myth with an interdisciplinary and intercultural collection of essays that reveals the significantly varied ways practitioners of "conventional" Western medicine handle bodies, study test results, configure statistics, and converse with patients.
Human and Organizational Factors in Nuclear Safety
This book discusses the specifics of safety regulations regarding nuclear risk and how experts contribute to the safety of nuclear installations. Drawing on research conducted in collaboration with the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), the ideas that are put forward rely on a review of the practices of speciali
On Critique
The relationship between sociology and social critique has haunted the discipline since its origins. Does critique divert sociology from its scientific project? Or is critique the ultimate goal of sociology, without which the latter would be a futile activity disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people? This issue has underpinned two divergent theoretical orientations that can be found in the discipline today: the critical sociology that was developed in its most elaborate form by Pierre Bourdieu, and the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski and his associates. In critical sociology, description in terms of power relations underscores the potency of mechanisms of ...
Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of scholars, the book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology.
Disasterland
This book analyses the making of the international world of ‘natural’ disasters by its professionals. Through a long-term ethnographic study of this arena, the author unveils the various elements that are necessary for the construction of an international world: a collective narrative, a shared language, and standardized practices. The book analyses the two main framings that these professionals use to situate themselves with regards to a disaster: preparedness and resilience, arguing that the making of the world of ‘natural’ disasters reveals how heterogeneous, conflicting, and sometimes competing elements are put together.
