Michael Guggenheim

Symmetrical twins: On the relationship between Actor-Network theory and the sociology of critical capacities:

This article explores the elective affinities between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the sociology of critical capacities. It argues that these two research programmes can be understood as symmetrical twins. We show the extent to which the exchange between Bruno Latour and Luc Boltanski has influenced their respective theoretical developments. Three strong encounters between the twin research programmes may be distinguished. The first encounter concerns explanations for social change. The second encounter focuses on the status of objects and their relationship to places. The third encounter is about the concept of critique. Drawing on their long-term mutual readings, we gain insight into how pleas for symmetrical analysis raised in response to Bourdieu’s theory of fields have evolved within both ANT and the sociology of critical capacity. We conclude by relating the development of the respective research programmes to the issue of disciplinary boundaries.

Practices of transdisciplinary research: close(r) encounters of science and society

ET ANOTHER SPECIAL ISSUE regarding interand transdisciplinarity may seem annoying to those readers who have followed the discussions about these issues in science policy circles. Interand transdisciplinarity have become buzzwords: their political prestige and ongoing fascination among researchers, notably in the domain of environmental or health issues, seem to rest on the impression that going interor transdisciplinary is ‘the right thing to do’. They strike such chords as ‘engage in responsible research’, ‘realize mutual learning’ and ‘orient science towards real-world problems and solutions’. Accordingly, transdisciplinary research has generated a host of projects and programs at all levels of funding (local, national, EU). Yet, little do we know as to how those research projects or programs, which explicitly claim to be part of such a new mode of knowledge production, actually operate. Previous research on transdisciplinarity has often concentrated on programmatic, epistemological and conceptual questions. Studies on the practices of transdisciplinary research are few and mostly directed toward interdisciplinary research (eg Weingart and Stehr, 2000). The articles collected in this special issue cover both interand transdisciplinary research projects or programs. Based on empirical research, we set out to provide a first overview of a range of projects pursued in this new mode of knowledge production and ask what the specific features of these projects really are. The introduction thus opens the floor for detailed case studies by first providing some definitions. Next, we give an overview of the themes of the articles and the methods employed. The main part of this introduction is devoted to a discussion of the findings of the articles assembled in this special issue: What are the different ways in which knowledge in transdisciplinary research is produced and evaluated? We will show that transdisciplinary research employs a wide range of institutional arrangements, procedures and methods in order to realize transdisciplinary knowledge production and evaluation. It will become evident that new modes of cooperative practices give rise to novel forms of organizing research which, in turn, structure cooperative research in novel ways. In addition to this, interand transdisciplinary research is about to have repercussions on university-based science at large. From this perspective, these cooperative forms of knowledge production are not only interesting in themselves; they are also a case for a new order of academic knowledge production. The call for producing ‘socially robust knowledge’ that is not only scientifically sound but also socially acceptable exerts all kinds of disciplining effects on persons (eg on researchers, citizens, administrators, etc), organizations (eg funding agencies, cooperating firms), Y

Laboratizing and de-laboratizing the world changing sociological concepts for places of knowledge production

How has sociology framed places of knowledge production and what is the specific power of the laboratory for this history? This article looks in three steps at how sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have historically framed the world as laboratory. First, in early sociology, the laboratory was an important metaphor to conceive of sociology as a scientific enterprise. In the 1950s, the trend reversed and with the emergence of a ‘qualitative sociology’, sociology was seen in opposition to laboratory work. With the ascent of laboratory studies, the laboratory perspective was again applied to many fields, including sociology itself. Based on a definition of a laboratory as aiming at placeless knowledge and being inconsequential this article argues that the two waves of laboratorization were metaphorical and did not really turn the world into a laboratory. Instead, two alternative concepts, those of the unilatory and the locatory, are proposed to gain a more precise understanding of some of these metaphorical uses of the term ‘laboratory’.

Building memory: Architecture, networks and users

Why are buildings such disputed objects with regard to time and memory, and what makes them peculiar? With the help of actor-network theory and the theory of functional differentiation, I show how objects in general relate to time and how objects can stabilize memories. I demonstrate the different ways in which networks place objects in time and how they are isolated and multiplied to relate to functional systems. I then argue that buildings cannot be controlled by functional systems because they cannot be isolated. This is so because they are singulars, occupy a stable location and are used by multiple users at the same time. For this reason I call them mutable immobiles. As mutable immobiles, buildings develop very complex relationships to times. They are changed and even converted to other building types, which cuts them off from their networks even though they still occupy the same location.

Undisciplined research: the proceduralisation of quality control in transdisciplinary projects

In this paper I argue that so-called trans-disciplinary research, that is problem-oriented, non-technological research outside the disciplinary structure, leads to a strengthening of organisational aspects of knowledge production and, particularly, of a change in quality standards. Quality standards are increasingly defined in intra-organisational or project-dependent and procedural instead of disciplinary terms. The paper is based on fieldwork in several environmental consulting companies that perform a broad, non-disciplinary spectrum of research and consulting. Although they perform government-funded research, neither their organisational structure nor their praxis is oriented towards disciplines. Instead their research focuses on social problems and methods that are translated into research without an intermediary disciplinary filtering. Quality has to be accomplished via non-disciplinary standards. These non-disciplinary standards are all procedural: namely quality management, timesheets and accompanying supervisory groups. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Introduction: disasters as politics – politics as disasters

Suddenly, disasters are everywhere. The social sciences have recently increased their output in disaster writing massively. The world is one big disaster. Crisis looms. The end is near. One way to diagnose this state is by pointing to an actual increase in disasters. This could be called a naturalization of the problem. Another diagnosis is to point to a general catastrophic cultural mood, a Zeitgeist, what we could call a culturalization. The first diagnosis, naturalization, is problematic for two reasons: disaster statistics tell a complex story: roughly speaking, throughout the twentieth century, the number of people killed by disasters has decreased, while the number of disasters and the damages reported has increased. In short, society protects people better, but disasters have become more frequent because people build and live in increasingly disaster prone areas. Moreover, sociologically speaking, discourses need not be in sync with events, as every student of antiSemitism or racism knows. Just because there are more disasters, there need not be more attention to them. Conversely, an increase in perceiving disasters does not necessarily mean that there are more disasters. There can be other reasons, as the forecasting of the now-forgotten ‘millennium bug’ showed. The second, the general Zeitgeist argument may be true, but it is unlikely: Why should it hold for many societies on very different paths? Why would we assume its continuity, after the end time scare of the millennium bug faded? Also, a preliminary bibliographical analysis with Google Ngram (Figure 1) shows that the general thematizing of disasters did not really increase, while the sociology of disasters increased remarkably since the mid-1990s. The question then is: Why can we observe such an increase in dealing with disasters in sociology and its neighbouring fields, an increase that is way out of proportion compared to the general increase in disaster literature and the actual amount of disasters? I will thus attempt a third answer, which we could call politicization, much more pertinent to this volume. The answer proposed here is that disasters emerge because our theoretical apparatus makes us more sensitive to them. They allow social science to test various theories and interests that have come to the bs_bs_banner

Concrete Governmentality: Shelters and the Transformations of Preparedness:

This article analyzes how shelters act as a form of concrete governmentality. Shelters, like other forms of preparedness, are political acts in the absence of a disaster. They are materializations and visualizations of risk calculations. Shelters as a type of concrete governmentality pose the question of how to build something that lasts and resists, and remains relevant both when the object that is being resisted keeps changing and when the very act of building intervenes so publicly in the life of the restless surrounding population. Comparing shelters in India, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight three transformations of preparedness that shelters trigger. First we analyse how shelters compose preparedness by changing the relationship between the state and its citizens. Rather than simply limiting risk or introducing ‘safety’, the building of shelters poses questions about who needs protection and why and, as we will show, this can generate controversy. Second, we analyse how shelters decompose preparedness by falling out of use. Third, we focus on struggles to recompose preparedness: Changing ideas about disasters thus lead to shelters being suddenly out of place, or needing to adapt.

Joy in Repetition Makes the Future Disappear

Every scientific field has to set up its own notions of progress, even though these may turn out to be time-dependent.1 Although it might be argued that STS as a field is still too young for a comparison of its initial goals and visions with its actual achievements, such an argument ignores the pressure on any new field to build up an intellectual, disciplinary and institutional identity.2 There are various ways of constructing such an identity: breaking with a tradition, and hence opposing it; inventing a past that serves to provide normative reference points for present directions; or continuously readjusting history to legitimize present and future courses of action. It is our contention that STS as a field has largely failed to set up criteria for its progress. Its development has proceeded for the most part in an unplanned manner and without a real center. The intellectual and social organization of STS was built around single books (and their authors) rather than with an attempt to establish a tradition in textbooks.3 The vagaries of the institutionalization of STS, although different in Europe and in the United States, have undoubtedly contributed to a process whose outcome resembles what Richard Whitley has called ‘fragmented adhocracies’ (which occasionally shade into ‘polycentric oligarchy’). The dominant feature of these sciences is their intellectual variety and fluidity. They lack a stable configuration of specialized tasks or problem areas, nor do they have strong cocoordinating mechanisms which systematically interrelate results and strategies. The underlying matrix is a combination of high task uncertainty with a low degree of mutual dependence (Whitley 2000).

The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets

This article looks at how building codes and zoning laws mediate the relationship between foreign building types and their uses. The article is based on insights from actor-network theory and analyzes buildings as quasi-technologies. It draws on two case studies in Switzerland. The first looks at the introduction of flat roofs along with modern architecture in the 1920s that led to the introduction of building codes in Ascona. The second is contemporary: it looks at the disputes about the right of Muslims to add minarets to prayer spaces that eventually led to an initiative to ban minarets altogether. In each of the cases I show how the building code mediates the travelling element and the associated lifestyle of the implicated groups and leads to a new definition of what those building types are. The law emerges as an important mediator of building types because it constantly shifts building types as being defined as material or social.

Organisierte Umwelt. Umweltdienstleistungsfirmen zwischen Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik

Der beispiellose Aufschwung des Umwelt- und Nachhaltigkeitskonzepts hat das Entstehen eines neuen Typus von Dienstleistungsfirmen begunstigt. Angesichts dieser Dynamik rucken die folgenden Fragen verstarkt in den Blick: Unter welchen Bedingungen entsteht in der Wissensgesellschaft politisiertes und kommerzialisiertes Beratungs- und Expertisewissen? Wie wird ausserhalb der universitaren Strukturen in Projekten geforscht und beraten? Die Studie integriert auf originelle Weise dichte ethnographische Beobachtungen hochmoderner Arbeitswelten mit der Theorie intersystemischer Organisationen. Sie liefert somit einen Schlussel zum Verstandnis der gegenwartigen Transformation der Umweltbewegung in wissensintensive Dienstleistungen.