Established sentiments, alternative agendas, and politics of concretization

Configurations

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 217-244

  Jensen, Casper Bruun ^a  

^a Department of International Economics and Management   (Denmark)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67651236925     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0014     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. See Helga Nowotny, Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). For commentary, see Marilyn Strathern, "A Community of Critics? Thoughts on New Knowledge," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12:1 (2006): 191-209.
2. Themes such as usefulness, intervention, and knowledge translation have been the focus of attention in a number of recent workshops and conferences in STS and cultural anthropology, including "Does STS Mean Business?" at the Säid Business School at University of Oxford in 2004 and 2005; "Description and Creativity: Approaches to Collaboration and Value from Anthropology, Art, Science and Technology" at King's College, Cambridge, in July 2005; and "Practices of Assessment and Intervention in Action-Oriented STS-Studies" in Amsterdam in April 2005.
3. See, for example, Marc Berg, "The Fruitful Amodernism of a Lingering Modernist: Commentary on Bruno Latour's 'On Interobjectivity,'" Mind, Culture, and Activity 3:4 (1996): 252-259;
4. Eric Monteiro and Ole Hanseth, "Social Shaping of Information Infrastructure: On Being Specific About the Technology," in Information Technology and Changes in Organizational Work, eds. W. J. Orlikowski, G. Walsham, M. R. Jones, and J. I. DeGross (London: Chapman & Hall, 1995), pp. 325-343.
5. See Marc Berg, "The Politics of Technology: On Bringing Social Theory into Technological Design," Science, Technology and Human Values 23:4 (1998): 456-491;
6. Marc Berg and Stefan Timmermans, "Order and Their Others: On the Constitution of Universalities in Medical Work," Configurations 8:1 (2000): 31-61.
7. See, for example, Casper Bruun Jensen, "Sorting Attachments: Usefulness of STS in Healthcare Practice and Policy," Science as Culture 16:3 (2007): 237-251.
8. As I note later on, Isabelle Stengers, in fact, encourages such an analysis.
9. See, for example, Sande Cohen, "Reading Science Studies Writing," in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 84-95;
10. for a commentary, Casper Bruun Jensen, "A Non-Humanist Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention," Configurations 12:2 (2004): 229-261.
11. See, for example, Marc Berg, Health Information Management: Integrating Information Technology in Health Care Work (New York: Routledge, 2004);
12. Claudio Ciborra, From Control to Drift: The Dynamics of Corporate Information Infrastructures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13. Berg, "The Fruitful Amodernism" (above, n. 3), p. 256.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Berg, "The Politics of Technology" (above, n. 4), p. 457.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 469.
20. Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry 30:2 (2004): 225-248.
21. Berg, "The Politics of Technology" (above, n. 4), p. 469.
22. Ibid., p. 480.
23. Ibid., p. 481.
24. Ibid., p. 482.
25. Berg and Timmermans, "Order and Their Others" (above, n. 4), p. 31.
26. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
27. Ibid., p. 33.
28. Ibid., p. 35.
29. Ibid., p. 45 (emphasis in original).
30. Ibid., p. 57.
31. Ibid., p. 60.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. ™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 15.
35. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 99.
36. Haraway, Modest-Witness (above, n. 30), p. 231.
37. Berg, "The Politics of Technology" (above, n. 4), p. 478.
38. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
39. Marc Berg, "Implementing Information Systems in Health Care Organizations: Myths and Challenges," International Journal of Medical Informatics 64 (2001): 143-156. The chapter was reprinted in Berg, ed., Health Information Management (London: Routledge, 2004), a volume that introduces the reader to challenges and lessons learned about how to manage information in health care.
40. Ibid., p. 144.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 145.
43. Ibid., p. 144.
44. Ibid., p. 146.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., p. 154.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., pp. 154-155.
49. See, for example, Joan Fujimura, "On Methods, Ontologies, and Representation in the Sociology of Science: Where Do We Stand" in Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss, ed. David Maines (New York: Aldine Transaction, 1991), pp. 207-249;
50. Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, "Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces," Information Systems Research 7:1 (1996): 111-134;
51. Lucy Suchman, "Technologies of Accountability: Of Lizards and Aeroplanes," in Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, ed. Graham Button (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 113-126.
52. Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
53. Berg and Timmermans, "Order and Their Others" (above, n. 4), p. 17.
54. Marc Berg, W. Schellekens, and Cé Bergen, "Bridging the Quality Chasm: Integrating Professional and Organizational Approaches to Quality," International Journal for Quality in Health Care 17:1 (2005): 75.
55. Ibid., p. 76.
56. Ibid., p. 79.
57. Ibid., p. 80.
58. Ibid.
59. Marc Berg et al., "Feasibility First: Developing Public Performance Indicators on Public Safety and Clinical Effectiveness for Dutch Hospitals," paper presented at the "Does STS Mean Business?" workshop, Säid Business School, University of Oxford, June 30, 2004.
60. For an egregious example, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
61. For discussion of some of these potential forms, see Jensen, "A Non-Humanist Disposition" (above, n. 7).
62. Timmermans and Berg, The Gold Standard (above, n. 46), p. 215.
63. Ibid., p. 216.
64. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 42-43.
65. Ibid., p. 43.
66. Ibid., p. 118. As Brown elaborates: "We do no favor, I think, to politics or intellectual life by eliminating a productive tension-the way in which politics and theory effectively interrupt each other-in order to consolidate certain political claims as the premise of a program of intellectual inquiry. Indeed, we usurp the increasingly scarce space allocated today to thinking" (ibid., p. 41).
67. Ibid., pp. 43-44.
68. The analysis of strategic essentialism in Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), has inspired these considerations.
69. Ibid., p. 43.
70. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology," South Atlantic Quarterly 101:1 (2002): 187-212.
71. Ibid., p. 187.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., pp. 191-192.
74. Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 15.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. For some, her figure seems distinctly too moderate, not to say conservative. Thus Rosi Braidotti refers to Stengers regressive "post-poststructuralism" in Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 23. Stengers is likened to a modern Auguste Comte in Nina Lykke, "Between Monsters, Goddesses, and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science," in Between Monsters, Goddesses, and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine, and Cyberspace, eds. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (London: Zed Books, 1996), pp. 13-30.
78. Ibid., p. 124.
79. Bruno Latour, "Trains of Thought: Piaget, Formalism, and the Fifth Dimension," Common Knowledge 3:6 (1996): 170-191.
80. Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science (above, n. 68), p. 124.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid., p. 15.
83. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 208.
84. Isabelle Stengers, "Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace," in Process and Difference: Between Cosmological .and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, eds. Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 238.
85. From Helen Watson-Verran, "Renegotiating What's Natural" (paper presented at the Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, October 12-15, 2004), cited in Haraway, Modest-Witness (above, n. 30), p. 113.