How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place. The screen is the market rather than (...) its representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its position within the postsocial relations constituted through trading online in the foreign exchange market. Desire is constituted and realized here through the object of the computer screen rather than with other people directly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objects that constitute persons virtually. (shrink)

The new terrorism is a major exemplifying case for complexity theory – for example, it exemplifies major disproportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictable outcomes, and self-organizing, emergent structures. It also illustrates, I argue in this article, the emergence of global microstructures: of forms of connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and (...) dispersed) interaction patterns. The analysis of complex global microstructures helps to collect and assess empirical evidence for the architecture of the global structural forms of a world society. It also suggests a theory of microglobalization – the view that the texture of a global world becomes articulated through microstructural patterns that develop in the shadow of (but liberated from) national and local institutional patterns. (shrink)

Markets have led a shadowy existence in economics. The ruling paradigm, neoclassical economics, for which markets are a central institution, has mainly been concerned with the determination of market prices. Until recently, sociological investigations of modern markets focused on production, as did anthropological work that ascertained how each culture made a living. The major debate among anthropologists to date has been about whether the economic rationality of the maximizing individual is to be found in all societies or whether substantive economies (...) are always embedded in a cultural matrix that determines its logics and forms of transaction. A new feature of financial markets is that they are based upon scopic systems – electronic and informational mechanisms of observing and contextualizing market reality and of back-projecting this reality onto the computer screens of globally operating traders. When such a mechanism is in place, coordination and activities respond to the reflected, represented reality rather than to pre-reflexive occurrences. This form of coordination contrasts with network forms of coordination that are pre-reflexive in character. In network markets, participants rely on their relationships to determine ‘where the market is’. In a market based on scopic systems, the market is fully visible on screen – as a set of tradable, comprehensively contextualized, quickly moving prices for various trading instruments. In this situation, a level of global inter-subjectivity emerges that derives from the character of these markets as reflexively observed by participants on their computer screens in temporal continuity, synchronicity, and immediacy. As a consequence, these markets are communities of time. As temporalized systems, financial markets project a form of coordination adapted to a global world that leaves behind the patterns of traditional producer and exchange markets. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to make sociological sense of the 2008 American election — particularly of the phenomenological observation of extraordinary enchantment and almost amorous attraction which unlikely members of the American population displayed for Obama, from the early days of the campaign onward. I draw on charisma theory to argue that sociology has something surprising to say on the phenomenon, and on the metaphor of the pipe to add detail about the technology of attraction that was in play.

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)

This book provides an exciting and diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains original essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. It will be useful across many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, science, cultural theory, history and anthropology.

Images are objects of work in the laboratory. On its face, this work is achieved through talk Yet the talk attached to these images makes reference to other images, which are drawn from varcous environments. In this article, four such environments are identified: the domain of laboratory practice; the context of invisible physical reactions; the future image as it will appear in publication; and the domain of case precedents and reference scenarios from the field. The work of image analysis brings (...) the outside of the image into it and takes the inside out. Thus it can be seen that images are not just taken, they are designed and made. (shrink)

In this paper, we apply imprinting theory to examine how institutional transformation substantially influences perceptions of corruption that we argue to be incorporated to a varying extent in organizations founded in that period. For this purpose, we compare the effect of a sudden shock (dissolution of the Soviet Union) on the managers' present perceptions to that of a steady transition (EU accession). We consult the 5th round of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey from 2012 to 2014 analyzing 4715 (...) interviews with managers of organizations from twelve Central and Eastern European countries. Our results reveal striking differences in the present perception of corruption for organizations founded immediately before and immediately after these institutional transitions. The study's results contribute to the research on imprinting theory regarding the relationship between organizations and institutional conditions that constitutes a lasting effect on organizational structures. Thus, applying an institutional perspective that considers less stable periods for organizations yields a promising avenue in research on organizational behavior. (shrink)

In the sociology of knowledge, the relationship between society and knowledge —or rather what separates them — remains an unsolved problem. A critical analysis of various solutions that we must look for to this problem suggests the plausibility of a passage between social groups, styles of argumentation and objects of knowledge. An empirical model of “decision displacements” is proposed on the basis of a corpus of texts and of observations derived from concrete analysis of a laboratory situation.

Die Rassentheorie, die Geschichtsphilosophie, die Ästhetik und die Naturteleologie haben eine Gemeinsamkeit: In all diesen Themengebieten entwickelte Immanuel Kant ein Denken der Zweckmässigkeit. Die Fokussierung auf diesen Strang macht eine Verbindung sichtbar, die von seinen frühen Schriften zu den unterschiedlichen »Rassen« der Menschen hin zur Kritik der Urteilskraft und damit zu seiner Selbstreflexion über die kritische Philosophie reicht. Karin Hostettler arbeitet das mit diesem Denken verbundene Othering und die damit einhergehende Selbstaffirmation heraus und zeigt so die Selbstverortung der kritischen (...) Philosophie in einer kolonialen Episteme auf. (shrink)

This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works and what it does. Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This book (...) reclaims a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste's role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. Illustrated with 70 images, taste's relationship to media is viewed through a variety of different lenses, including books, photography, magazines, internet, social media and algorithms. Written for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields, this book will be a helpful resource for all those interested in the question of taste, and is an invitation to produce and consume all media critically. (shrink)

Neo-Scholastic metaphysics plays an outstanding role in 17th century philosophy. The beginnings of the modern scientific view of the world originate from precisely the same time. With reference to the anatomist Francis Glisson (ca. 1597-1677), this study investigates the significance of school metaphysics for the inception of a new form of natural philosophy. It shows that Glisson developed a retrospective theory of substance from his identity as a scientist. In so doing, it casts a surprising light on the formative intellectual (...) conditions governing the emergence of the sciences in the modern age. (shrink)

In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism is an accessible introduction to Karen Barad's agential realist philosophy. The authors take on a unique approach to involve the readers in in/formal conversations between Karen, postgraduates, and researchers at a research event held in 2017 at Cape Town, South Africa.

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous—and still widely held—theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation to overgeneralize the work of culture, and to lapse into a kind of essentialism that flattens the range and variety of scientific work. The book refers to this tendency as culturalism. The contributors to the volume model a new path where historicized and cultural accounts of (...) scientific practice retain their specificity and complexity without falling into the traps of culturalism. They examine, among other issues, the potential of using notions of culture to study behavior in financial markets; the ideology, organization, and practice of earthquake monitoring and prediction during China's Cultural Revolution; the history of quadratic equations in China; and how studying the "glass ceiling" and employment discrimination became accepted in the social sciences. Demonstrating the need to understand the work of culture as a fluid and dynamic process that directly both shapes and is shaped by scientific practice, Cultures without Culturalism makes an important intervention in science studies. Contributors. Bruno Belhoste, Karine Chemla, Caroline Ehrhardt, Fa-ti Fan,Kenji Ito, Evelyn Fox Keller, Guillaume Lachenal, Donald MacKenzie, Mary S. Morgan, Nancy J. Nersessian, David Rabouin, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Claude Rosental, Koen Vermeir. (shrink)

Generality is a key value in scientific discourses and practices. Throughout history, it has received a variety of meanings and of uses. This collection of original essays aims to inquire into this diversity. Through case studies taken from the history of mathematics, physics and the life sciences, the book provides evidence of different ways of understanding the general in various contexts. It aims at showing how individuals have valued generality and how they have worked with specific types of "general" entities, (...) procedures, and arguments. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz leitete die Bibliothek der Hannoveraner Welfen vierzig Jahre lang bis zu seinem Tod 1716.

Humboldts texttheoretischer Ansatz, dessen Einfluß auf die moderne (Text-)Linguistik größer ist als bisher wahrgenommen, wird im ersten Teil dieses Bandes erstmals zusammenhängend nachgewiesen.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)