In 2010, Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce edited Material Powers through Routledge. The volume is mainly about bringing power back into cultural studies, especially cultural studies research that attends to issues of state and colonialism, but without losing out on the “material turn” in the anthropology of the state (on that, see a great 2006 reader, The Anthropology of the State). While the chapters are not all of equal quality, a few really stand out, provided you’re willing to swallow the cultural studies pill — there are not bolded concepts and data seems to come in many forms.

Personally, I’ve always been exceptionally tolerant (fond, even) of cultural studies because the entire enterprise is, when done well, like a theory/philosophy incubator, moreover, the writers while sometimes maddeningly opaque, often provide readers with sentizing imagry that is unforgettable (here, I’m thinking of A Thousand Plateaus). Material Powers, so far at least, has not uncovered any masterful metaphors yet, but the authors masterfully tackle a huge issue for researchers who appreciate “the material”, which is: what to do with such a dirty word as “power” without violating basic assumptions in actor-network and foucauldian models of society and governance?

I’ve stumbled across a great case for infrastructure studies: Chicago’s Pedway.

Against the order of the grid city of Chicago, the disorderly pedway was a surprisingly organic and inconsistent “vision” of civil engineering with no grand oversight or centralized control mechanism to insure maintenance, cleanliness, and so on. It was fascinating, and because a number of major metropolitan areas have them, comparisons for sake of research would be plentiful. This is an untapped case with tons of potential.

Pedways are pedestrian walkways and they are both above ground and below; in Chicago’s case, it is a combination of the two. Here’s the upshot for us:

• there is no overarching vision for this walkway infrastructure (and few accurate maps); 
• there is no basic understanding of the total cost of this;
• it is still being developed;
• it is privately produced and owned (in sections) but explicitly designed for the public;
• it is not goverened other than in approximately 30 meter sections (which mirror, often, the building above or below);
• it is sectioned by revolving doors (so that the pedway does not just become a massive wind tunnel);
• it is inconsistently developed over time (some sections are less than a year old while others are decades old);
• nobody owns it, although it is maintained in sections, but this means that there is nobody to “ask” if you want to film it; 
• they connect elevated train stops, but with no apparent logic;
• legal codes within the walkway are not fully deveoped or understood;
• and, despite many more oddities, it is inconsistently available for public use, meaning that two contiguous sections might be open during different periods of the day…

So, you can go on tours, which span from artistic and philosophical in nature to practical and even humorous in nature (I took this tour; Margaret Hicks is an ex-comedian who gives a great tour through “Chicago Elevated”). Here is a description of the “loose infrastructure” in Chicago:

Chicago’s Pedway, a series of heated walkways, passages and tunnels, serve as the backdrop for an amusing and enlightening tour of some of the hot-spots (or a least warm-spots) of downtown Chicago.  The tour focuses on interesting anecdotes and tales about some of the great buildings downtown, but it’s also a study of the city underneath the city. The Pedway is a  strange and wonderful place and adds so much to the city’s personality. These are great tours for Chicagoans who want to learn more about the city and for tourists who want a full Chicago experience without ever going outside.

Here are some pictures from my experience in the “loose infrastructure” of Chicago’s Pedway

By Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence is a terrific book.

The two stylistic issues that stand out to me are the clever blending of historical/empirical material with conceptual/sensitizing meta-commenting as well as effortless shifting between geography, political science, STS, and other disciplines. After all, when the entire enterprise turns on the river Rhône, we cannot help but to see, for example, how hydrological changes to the river become inextricably linked to political and cultural events of the 21st century or how the river was iconic of the French state and re-building efforts after the second world war (and there is much, much more to un-tangle).

This is a rich, historical text that will not upset sociologists whom might be more interested in the generalized patterns at play or the take-away new concept for their toolkits … although, those types of sociologists will have to be patient because conceptual matters are peppered throughout the well-seasoned document. Although, the patience is reward by excellent writing; varied sentence structure, lively telling of the past, occasionally challenging vocubulary, and a deep sensitivity for differences between translated languages so that we often get the original French term alongside the translated English substitute.

My friends in infrastructure, especially water infrastructure like Patrick Carroll and Govind Gopakumar have probably already found this gem, but if they have not — take a look!

Previously I posted about how another edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies is coming out and a new set of editors was about to be named. Now, I own the 2001 “Revised” (or 2nd) edition, and have not closely read the 2007 (or 3rd) edition. Does anyone know what the first edition was called? I can only remember that I used to see The Science Studies Reader on the bookshelf…? Although, the editors of the 2007 edition suggest that a 1970s book titled Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society was the progenitor of the handbook series.

Apparently, the 2013 (or 4th) edition is on the make.

In the 2001 edition, the editors took the role of purported “cartographers” (2001:xi) and chose to map out the contours and meridians of STS (seemed apropos after Tom Gieryn’s Cultural Boundaries of Science in 1999). In the 2007 edition, the editors (2007:3) split the book into sections: theory and method, relations to other fields, public engagement, and something like enduring themes. Of particularly interesting note, as we shall see, is that the original 1970s handbook apparently took 6 years to complete, the 2001 edition (which was originally published in 1995 with 4S) took 7 years to complete, and the 2007 edition (the largest in terms of pages, contributors, and contributions was also published with 4S) took 8 years (2007:2).

The new edition appears to return to the original titling from the 1970s:

… the Handbook of Science, Technology and Society, to be published by Routledge … While there are other handbooks that consider science, technology and society, what we envision is a volume that addresses specific substantive domains, is unified by attention to common themes, and which uses empirical cases to illustrate theoretical claims. 

Instead of drawing a map of STS or cross-cutting into a few categories, this new edition, which is under the perview of 4S too, will be:

… a volume that addresses six substantive domains that shape and are shaped by science and technology:  Digitization, Environments, Technoscience and/ as Work, Technoscience and Bodies, Rules and Standards, and Consuming Technoscience.  Many handbooks seek to capture a field with some comprehensiveness, but without promoting coherence across essays. Instead, we ask each contributor consider one or more of three key processes in their substantive essays:  how and why ideas, artifacts, and practices come to be institutionalized or disrupted; what explains the scale at which technoscience comes to have meaning, is struggled over and travels; and/ or the means by which materiality and cultural value(s) shape science and technology.  We ask each author to read two other chapters in the volume, and to engage them in some way in their own chapter.  While much in STS is richly descriptive, we seek work that is explanatory, and that weaves a clear and cogent argument through an empirical case or cases.

Now, what is also exciting and interesting are the proposed deadlines:

an abstract … [due] by 10 March 2012, … a first draft … [due] by 5 October 2012. … A final draft … due by 5 March 2013.

If the new editors even come close to their target deadlines, this will be the most quickly prepared handbook to date. Should prove to be a most excellent edited volume.

Description

Information systems are researched, published on, and utilized as an extremely broad and vital sector of current technology development, usually studied from the scientific or technological viewpoints therein.

Phenomenology, Organizational Politics, and IT Design: The Social Study of Information Systems offers a new look at the latest research and critical issues within the field of information systems by creating solid theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical findings of social developments. Professionals, academics, and researchers working with information will find this volume a compelling and vital resource for a cross fertilization among different, yet complementary, and strictly connected domains of scientific knowledge, consisting of information systems research, philosophy of social science, and organizational studies.

One example of the heightened institutional appropriation of ethnomethod’s reflexive nature emerges from Nicholas Rowland study of Enterprise Resource Planning software usage in American Universities (Rowland, this volume). His empirical case study demonstrates that the received ethnomethodological transcendental interest that the social order is always a local accomplishment—that is the result of a concerted activity of a community of co-operating fellows—requires some further discussion. Rowland’s paper provides illustrations of how people involved in large-scale information systems implementation do not know what they mean when they produce accounts. He does so by making reference to the ‘fit-gap work’ taking place during ERP implementations, but he also identifies how participants found ways to deal with these uncertainties, to manage the reflexivity of their understandings. In particular, he makes reference to the “prioritizing/de-prioritizing” work. Something that cannot be decided, or evaluated on the basis of a sufficiently accountable manner, gets de-prioritized. The most useful feature of de-prioritization is that issues related to implementation that become de-prioritized are “removed without removing” and remain in the purgatory of prospective possibilities.

The process of natural objectification of practices for organizing the orderliness of events produces tools, instruments, artefacts, benchmarks that become available for future and distant accomplishments. What the illustration deriving from the “fit-gap work” reminds us is that these commodities are certainly re-enacted in each locale, but people do not re-invent the wheel all the same all the time. Prior than the transcendent re-enactment of social order, the chief interest of social researchers in information system is on the layers of customization encrusted in organizing artifacts and ordering systems that protect people from being disbanded every time they encounter even the most routine task. What Nicholas Rowland study suggests is that it is true that people do not know what they mean when they produce accounts, but it is also true that they know that. And by knowing that, people’s major occupation is to produce work-arounds in order to reduce the noise of the reflexivity of understandings (e.g. the ‘fit-gap work’). These accomplishments, that take the form of routines, tools, instruments, artefacts and institutions, are of central interest for a social researcher in Information Infrastructures.

I don’t know how this book was not on my “to read” list until now, but it is a fabously written book: Jo Guldi’s Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State.

Guldi does a first-rate STS analysis; this primarily historical work is peppered with sociological and political insights, none more important, to my mind, than the idea that large-scale infrastructural investments cause conflict (it seems no matter what) and have the potential to transform a nation (ironically, from within). As it happens, Britain was the first nation to be united by (albeit primitive) highways connecting nearly every town and village. For those of us in love with blueprint images, the book has a couple that I would like to have full-sized, framed, and mounted on my office wall. One of the take-aways from this historical analysis is a fresh look at the now old insight that we are growing increasingly isolated, and that one of the core causes is technological in nature. Instead of focusing on cellular phones or social networking media, the book draws our attention to roads, specifically, how roads bring us together on the roads but utlimately isolate us from the people we are now in contact with more often. Still, perhaps the author could have said something more about the role of signs and the innumeration of places. However, the section devoted to how Britain was even colonizing its own people, through the elaboration of roads at home, rings an appropriate bell for scholars that like a little humor in their science.

NOTE: Joanna Guldi is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History, University of Chicago, and a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. She also runs the Landscape Studies Podcast.

Tom Vanderbilt is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, and in a recent news/interest article, he framed the acceptance of public transit as an infrastructure question; that is, infrastructure with soul, that is still efficient for moving human bodies around.

It is a striking comparison he makes in the opening image:

Planned cities like Dubai (left) are considered high system/low empathy while places that grew more organically, like the favelas of  Rio (right) are low system/high empath.

Then he goes onto to ask, can you make infrastructure that is efficient, but still has soul?

A planned-from-scratch place like Dubai, or Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” Leadbeater argued, was “high system/low empathy,” while the favelas of Rio, which grew up organically and are sustained by a web of informal networks, could be considered “low system/high empathy.” Then there are places—Lagos, he suggested—where neither axis is particularly optimized. How, he wanted to know, could you design for both?

For many of us, the “infra” in infrastructure denotes a relatively straightforward image of “something below,” in this case, a structure below, which is usually conceptualized as a supporting or facilitating structure that allows other practices, events, etc. to “happen” or “take place.” Hence, infra equates to below, if sensitized to issues of hiearchy (rather than, say, scale or functionality). I wrote about this here.

The problem is, many of us are, as Hendrik put it, “flat-earthers,” meaning that we have adopted a lateral perspective in our research, mainly, as a matter of principle. Latour is probably one of the most famous proponents of this “view” that challenges hierarchy at every turn, and this argument is made well enough in his 2005 book.Hence, “flat-earthers” reject issues of hierarchy as being in any way hierarchical.

I present these choices as binary, meaning if you elect one you cannot select the other. You must choose either a hiearchical or laternal perspective. To some extent, they are contradictory comments on reality (or perspectives) because “politics from the side” (i.e., assuming a lateral world) rejects any preordained notions of hierarchy, above as well as below (i.e., “politics from below” or assuming a hierarchical world). The only alternative, I posited, “would be a position where one argues that infrastructure is “made to be below” through lateral practices.”

This solution, which I posted moments ago on Hendrik’s post, was that we could turn “politics from below” into the research question for a scholar committed to “politics from the side” and turn hierarchy in to what has to be explained instead of what we assume a priori. This is one way to change the view of “politics from below” vs. the “politics from the side” into “politics from below” as the “politics from the side” in infrastructure studies

I was advertising the paper by Marion Brivot and Yves Gendron earlier last year, now I have finally come around to give it a more thorough read. I am really impressed, and I would like to push a couple of points here about infrastructures that can be taken from this work (which, again, in its entirety is here).
The paper, first of all, does a good job of introducing the literature about new forms of surveillance, adding on a couple of recent French works that have yet to be taken up, as far as I can tell, in international discourse (whether in STS or accounting). Most notably, Brivot and Gendron adopt the notion of “sousveillance” or, in the English terminology they are proposing, “sub-veillance”, from a paper by Dominique Quessada. The basic insight is that contemporary ICTs indeed establish new forms of visibility and discipline but rather than an updated form of Benthamite panopticism a lateral form of surveillance is the result. Against this background the “big brother” idea of control appears like a belittlement of actual governance and the type of discipline that results from the ICT-mediated visibility of individual and collective conduct, and like a more or less infantile projection of disciplinary power among the governed. In contemporary forms of “sub-veillance” individuals play games of visibility and visibilization from which discipline emerges laterally from reflexive processes of reciprocal control and impression management. Brivot and Gendron demonstrate this empirically by a case study of a knowledge management system in an tax/law firm.
The authors argue that while panopticism may be an outdated image of contemporary forms of surveillance, the Foucauldian account of technologies of the self doing the actual governing remains very much valid. In effect, they present us with an Foucauldian account beyond panopticism which I think, may be very relevant to infrastructure studies with respect to ICT. While many people, faced with the power of ICT to make activities and economies visible and accessible to control, are still primarily afraid that a central power will accumulate some form of power-knowledge in order to control them, in the social network, facebook, and twitter world, the real power resides in the spread of artefacts and inscriptions across networks and participants. The despotic power of visibility, if it really exists, primarily derives from participants’ inclination to make themselves visible and from playing ICTs competitively in one way or another. Governance, control, and so on do not the result from some general plan or paradigm but from often from idiosyncratic detournments.
In conclusion, Brivot and Gendron urge the reader to “take into account the complexities, ambiguities and paradoxes which characterize today’s rhizomatic forms of control and surveillance. This is a difficult task since one of the greatest challenges confronting surveillance studies is to develop a grasp on the chaos and cacophony that underlie the spread of surveillance in organizations and society (…). Foucault can be very useful in making sense of this cacophony – as long as researchers look beyond the confines of the panoptical conceptualization which, quite paradoxically, Foucault helped to make fashionable.” (p. 153)
Now, I am stumbling upon another paper in the same journal that is just about to be published, arguing something very similar about the use of online ratings and social media in the travel sector. It is written by Susan Scott and Wanda Orlikowski; check it out here.
Looks like the old Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary power is just getting a Web 2.0 update.

Happiness is trending downward, globally, according to a new study about Twitter using an “hedonometer” to assess tweets.

The paper is interesting material, although a challenge to fully appreciate in places (given that this study could have been book-length).

Here are their opening remarks:

One of the great modern scientific challenges we face lies in understanding macroscale sociotechnical phenomena–i.e., the behavior of decentralized, networked systems inextricably involving people, information, and machine algorithms–such as global economic crashes and the spreading of ideas and beliefs [1]. Accurate description through quantitative measurement is essential to the advancement of any scientific field, and the shift from being data scarce to data rich has revolutionized many areas [2]–[5] ranging from astronomy [6]–[8] to ecology and biology [9] to particle physics [10]. For the social sciences, the now widespread usage of the Internet has led to a collective, open recording of an enormous number of transactions, interactions, and expressions, marking a clear transition in our ability to quantitatively characterize, and thereby potentially understand, previously hidden as well as novel microscale mechanisms underlying sociotechnical systems [11].

What’s the upshot for infrastructure folks? Check out the first line above:

One of the great modern scientific challenges we face lies in understanding macroscale sociotechnical phenomena–i.e., the behavior of decentralized, networked systems inextricably involving people, information, and machine algorithms–such as global economic crashes and the spreading of ideas and beliefs…

This is something of our challenge in research too. However, even this huge, abstract portrayal of the problem — as being about people, info, and algorithms that bind them — happens somewhere. It is the sum of microscale sociotechnical phenomenoa, no doubt, but, of course, that does not make these trends “macro” out of hand (other than in the constructivist’s sense that we literally “make” them macro). So, there is a matter of scale (thanks again, Kathryn, for all your thoughts on scalar issues), and I wonder if the solution, a la Tom Gieryn, is to reduce our concerns over scale and instead focus on topographical depictions/conceptualizations (?).

In closing, and I have no real explanation ready-at-hand, what is are the “algorithms that bind” people and information (or resources) in infrastructure studies? This might unlock some new territory for case study experts and more quantitative types (like the authors cited above) to work together in future research…

In my first post, I said that I would take a look at issues of scale and the idea of infrastructure as “sunk cost” versus infrastructure as “base”. In this, my last post, I would like to explore how these issues might be related.  That is, on the one hand, how our conceptions of scale may to some extent predetermine our view of infrastructure as a “sunk cost”; and, on the other hand, what a view of infrastructure as “base” might imply for how we approach scale.

These are very much ideas in development, so please weigh in!

The concept of geographical scale generally focuses on delineations of territorial organization (e.g., local, national, global). Although seemingly durable, these are taken as constructed and thus transitory. This observation is meant to draw attention away from scale to the production of scale. Despite this critical approach to scale, certain seemingly self-imposed limits to analysis persist. As Marston (2000) points out, scale in geography overemphasizes processes of capitalist production while ‘ignoring social reproduction and consumption’.

The tendency then, when thinking of networked infrastructure, is to examine it at the scale at which investments and decisions about investments (or the lack thereof) are made. In most instances, this is the municipal scale. In a multi-scalar approach you would include higher scale actors that may regulate issues that influence investments, such as service quality. In the case of water, this would imply some level of senior government. When the focus is placed on these actors, to the neglect of consumers and households, it is easy to interpret infrastructure though the metaphor of the sunk cost. But what if a more relational perspective that would include “social reproduction and consumption” were applied?

In such a case, the metaphor of infrastructure as base, as opposed to sunk cost would (I argue) have more to offer. The concept of “base” comes from Stephen Gudeman’s work in economic anthropology.  Gudeman takes the concept of the base from rural subsistence farmers in Colombia. For the farmers and their families the base is “the wealth of the house” on which it can draw the necessary materials for work and subsistence and to generate some gain to expand the base. It is the safety net and the means of building and enhancing economic security and wealth over time. In a neoclassical model, the firm invests in infrastructure to create profit; in the household model, one invests in the base to build the base, which provides security and steady improvements in livelihoods. Whereas for the households that Gudeman studies, the base consist of land, tools, seed etc. If one were to apply the base concept to a community, its base should include various elements of public infrastructure.

What would it mean to understand infrastructure as base? And what does in mean for scale in relation to infrastructure? First, understanding infrastructure as base as opposed to a sunk cost, moves it from a firm model to a community model of analysis. Infrastructure in this sense is part of the community’s base, which is developed and sustained through collective community funds. On the other hand, this infrastructure enables individual households and users greater opportunity to build their own base at the household scale. This is because it is a fundamental element of what they need to engage in manifold forms of social and economic activity.

Second, in terms of scale, it would mean trying to work with Marston’s critique. Could scalar approaches in STS help to do this? In STS, scale is approached through the theory of Multi Level Transitions (MLT), which arranges scales around the development, deployment, uptake, and function of technology. The focus on deployment and uptake brings users into the analysis of how scale might be applied to infrastructure. But I wonder if the nested and hierarchical images that are inherent in scale can capture what would be a web of social relations in an extended base model for infrastructure. Should we scale across rather than up to understand how infrastructure might relate to dispersed users and not just those who build it ? This would seemingly bring us to a Latourian model, but with significant amounts of repetition in the network. Moreover, this repetition of households in the network is cumulative. That is, while they may relate to infrastructure individually, their collective relationship is significant and implies important influence on the municipal scale and its investments in the “base”.

A big thanks to Nicholas for introducing me to Installing (social) Order and for inviting me to participate. I’ve gotten a lot of food for thought from your comments and posts and look forward to continuing to follow the blog. Kathyn

After reading this news article, which suggests that Jakarta needs an “infrastructure upgrade,” I am convinced that law-based infrastructure studies would be quite interesting to read.

The article states:

“The law will smooth the development of public infrastructure,” said lawmaker Daryatmo Mardiyanto, who chaired the special committee that drafted the bill. “It will provide legal certainty and fairness for the people.”

While Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, could be the next Asian economy to take off, analysts say it has to address its overburdened infrastructure if it wants double-digit growth. Gross domestic product is projected to grow about 6.5% this year,

The interaction between law, economics, and state development seems like an obviously good vantage point for future scholarship. In fact, this might be a good way to get at the “infrastructure sector” that Hendrik mentioned a while back, and maybe a way to rethink the role of venture capitalists in infrastructure.

Check it out on orgtheory.net — thought provoking stuff.

Review of: Gopakumar, Govind. 2012. Transforming Urban Water Supply in India The Role of Reform and Partnerships in Globalization (Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series). London/New York: Routledge; $140.00/£85.00 hrdbk.

Here are the introduction and conclusion:

                This is a book about infrastructure. Author of Water Resources (Raju et a. 2004), Govind Gopakumar’s new book Transforming Urban Water Supplies in India is a welcome title from the Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, especially for science and technology studies because of its empirical and analytical emphasis on what I will call here the ‘state-infrastructure’ relationship. In introducing the core topic of the book, infrastructure, Gopakumar (2012: p, 1) invites nearly every discipline to the table, from ‘engineers and technologists’, ‘historians, geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists’ to ‘urban technological historians’, ‘sociologists of utility networks’, urban geographers’ and ‘technology studies scholars.’ And rightly so; infrastructures studies are complex and complicated precisely because they defy straightforward explanation by any disciplinary jurisdiction; in infrastructure, geographic issues are political, social issues are technical, and so on. And yet, infrastructure often drifts from our conscious view as citizens. Building on Graham and Marvin’s (2001:181) works, Gopakumar shows us that infrastructures might be ‘banal constructions’ that fade into taken-for-grantedness, but they tell us a lot about the formation and consequence of their governance, especially regarding public and private partnerships to enhance or expand infrastructure and the relationship between infrastructural development and states (as well as subnational states, in India’s case). In all, the book takes an historical-comparative approach with the unit of analysis being the city. Gopakumar expertly selects three cities to compare, and the selection process appears to be based on differing relationship between the subnational state, within which the city is embedded, and the broader Indian (federal) state and variations in how each city, responding to global and federal pressures, establishes public-private partnerships thus forming urban water supply regimes.

                <….>

                Where does this book land on the shelf? Certainly, it is a great fit with the Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series. The book is also a more cohesive statement replete with future directions for research, which is missing in Gopakumar’s (2011, 2010a, 2010b) individual research articles on water infrastructure. Patrick Carroll’s (2011) recent work on water infrastructure in California pairs nicely with where Gopakumar (2011) is going in his recent and future research wherein he more explicitly conceptualizes states, stateness, and governmentality, unsurprisingly, using some of Carroll’s (2006) previous research as a touch point and some of my work regarding an actor-network model of states (Passoth and Rowland 2010). In closing, Govind’s book is somewhat bigger than it appears; literally, as the book is only 176 pages long, but also theoretically and empirically because the long-term potential of studying state-infrastructure relations seems so promising.

Lawrence Busch’s new book Standards has just been added to the list competing for the Merton book award!

Standards are the means by which we construct realities. There are established standards for professional accreditation, the environment, consumer products, animal welfare, the acceptable stress for highway bridges, healthcare, education–for almost everything. We are surrounded by a vast array of standards, many of which we take for granted but each of which has been and continues to be the subject of intense negotiation. In this book, Lawrence Busch investigates standards as “recipes for reality.” Standards, he argues, shape not only the physical world around us but also our social lives and even our selves.  

Busch shows how standards are intimately connected to power–that they often serve to empower some and disempower others. He outlines the history of formal standards and describes how modern science came to be associated with the moral-technical project of standardization of both people and things. He examines the use of standards to differentiate and how this affects our perceptions; he discusses the creation of a global system of audits, certifications, and accreditations; and he considers issues of trust, honesty, and risk. After exploring the troubled coexistence of standards and democracy, Busch suggests guidelines for developing fair, equitable, and effective standards. Taking a uniquely integrated and comprehensive view of the subject, Busch shows how standards for people and things are inextricably linked, how standards are always layered (even if often addressed serially), and how standards are simultaneously technical, social, moral, legal, and ontological devices.

On friday and saturday I participated at a small, well organised STS-workshop on „(In)Stabilities – Processuality in STS“ in Darmstadt/Germany. Participants came from cultural anthropology and ethnology, sociology, English and American Studies. The papers presented were all really interesting, but in my opinion most of them shared one crucial problem: a lack of theory or, at least, they lacked a connection of empirical research with theory. One of the papers even addressed the question, if it is even helpful to ‘superimpose’ theoretical terms and concepts on empirical research/findings. And that really made me think: What relevance has theory in/for STS? What function does theory have in STS? Is STS more about „thick descriptions“ than on theorizing about empirical phenomena? And how do you get a description of empirical findings that is more than just renarration, without using theoretical terms and concepts? What is the additional benefit of renarrating? So, once again: A naive newcomer to STS ‘lost in translation’…Please help.

We are still accepting nominations   for the Merton book award of the Science, Knowledge and Technology section of the ASA.

What book(s) do you think might have a chance at the Merton award?

Write the Merton book award committee with your nomination, or just write me and I’ll pass it along to the committee.

So far, we have two strong nominations, which are:

1. Gil Eyal, Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi, The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
   
2. Cyrus C. M. Mody, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).
   

As the British government is getting ready to announce a commitment of £5bn of public funding to a massive investment plan in infrastructures over the next couple of days, I am wondering how infrastructures sometimes are respecified in the redistribution of collective resources. The British government has been cutting back on public sector expenditures in almost all areas, including many types of support that would, I think, be included in sociological notions of infrastructure (like subsidies in transport, communication, education etc.). Now the rationale appears to be that some of that spending has to be redirected in order to attract private investment in infrastructures – while most of the cuts of course have remain as they were (and one immediately suspects more cuts will be forthcoming in order to support the “infrastructure boost”).

This is obviously another demonstration of how the scope of what is deemed a collectively indispensable infrastructure is subject of political spin and generally, I suspect, in any case much narrower than an exploration of instructures in terms of hybrid assemblages (or more broadly in STS terms) would have it. In this case, roads and energy are apparently deemed more essential than the “soft” human infrastructures within the collective, even in a service econony like the UK. Still, there is some discretion taken by policy-makers apparent here in defining the scope of the collectively indispensable more or less broadly. It may be worthwhile in exploring states’ contribution to the maintenance of infrastructures to look specifically at the fringes or gray areas where infrastructure policies are regularly accommodated. Political respecifications are also visible in attempts by interested private actors (investors, entrepreneurs, lobbyists etc.) to accommodate this scope, e.g. in the areas of housing and water mentioned in recent postings, particularly in Kathryn’s Medellín reports.

Conversely, there is also the question of how infrastructures are respecified economically in creating something like an infrastructure sector (as mentioned in the article from the Guardian linked above), i.e. as a type of aggregate market.

What are we to make of such political or economic respecifications (or re-assemblings) of infrastructures? Is it a reasonable strategy of sociological exploration confronting such respecifications be to go for the broadest possible understanding of infrastructures in order to effectively re-frame these more specific remediations? At the moment I feel tempted to say yes – but such a strategy would really beg for at least some kind of respecification that is genuinely sociological – if that can (or should?) indeed be re-assembled.

In Medellín this week (November 13 to 19), among a host of other events, is the 7th Interamerican Dialogue on Water (http://d7.rirh.org/). This conference takes place every three years. It is meant to act as a regional conference in order to prepare documents on five core themes as contributions to the World Water Forum in Marseille, France in February 2012. The themes included: water governance, a culture of water, financial sustainability, managing knowledge and information, and confronting challenges and needs.

The conference was organized try to get as much input from all the participants as possible. The first three days were organized along the “world cafe” model. A “mesa” or a round table was held for each core theme and participants (more than 1000) could pick which theme was on interest to them. Over two days the mesas met many times and in each, the group was broken up in nine further sub themes and in groups of 4 or 5 everyone circled the room to discuss themes, come up with key issues, later strategies, and later commitments. The leaders of each mesa worked long hours to develop a synthesis document on the core theme that was presented to large assembly on the last day of the conference.

There were also side working groups according to interest group (utility operators, transboundary issues, governance, rotary…) as well as panel presentations on issues such as water and energy, ecosystems etc.

The model of the conference was extraordinary for facilitating the development of relationships between people within such a large group by given everyone a chance to work together. This was very fruitful.

One of the things that struck me though was the overlap between the outcomes of the working groups on the key themes. Many issues kept popping up that could be said to fall into the governance category (bringing us back to questions of the breadth and utility of the concept). People were often concerned with oversight, accountability and transparency, and the human right to water came up again and again.

One interesting intervention that I heard on this point was from the head of the water division of Medellin’s public utility EPM. In his presentation, he underscored the point that without a definition of what the human right means, it is rather inconsequential. For example does it mean free water in every home? Free water within a reasonable distance (say 100 m)? Does it mean water within a reasonable distance at an affordable price for each socio-economic group? He also made the point that the human right to water must involve the state. That reaching such a goal largely depends on improving people’s lives and socio-economic opportunities, it cannot default to utilities. A final thing he noted was the confusion between 100% infrastructural coverage and the right to water; without the ability to pay, access to infrastructure does not mean access to water.

I think these points deserve some attention. I have attached some pictures of the conference venue (including a concert given by a local band). In the next post, I will attach some pictures from the infrastructure extension projects in the disadvantaged barrios.

Jan and I, and student of mine, Alexander B. Kinney, wrote a book review of Latour’s “introduction that is not an introduction” to ANT, Reassembling the Social, for Spontaneous Generations.

I was reminded of this earlier today, about reassembling more than just the social, and so I reread this passage:

Even with these newly crafted tools fresh from the ANT workshop, Latour
has still not gone far enough. If we have to Reassemble the Social, then why
not Politics or Economics too? Why not the Law or the State or other modes of
existence Latour simply allows to stand un-reassembled? As an analytical strategy,
dropping the Social as a category of things is a good idea. But if we decide to take
Latour seriously, then we must be equally suspicious of the “political arena” or
“economic climate” too, and it surely does not mean that we empirically ignore
the onto-politics of Law, Politics, Economics, etc., if these are all just ways to
“arrange the collective.” What is missing is an idea of how to draw distinctions
between them analytically without reifying them in the process. The way that
“modes of existences” and “arrange the collective” are introduced in this book
leaves an aftertaste of bitter reification. How are we to distinguish between ways
of juridical, economic or scientific assembling? We are left without an answer,
just with the hint that this would need another book to reassemble each (Latour,
forthcoming). It is a good thing that the book ends trying to be constructive
and not merely de(con)structive; however, if we buy the ticket (the book) and
take the ride (read it), then we deserve more—we must either deconstruct more
in order to rebuild everything as a mere matter of associations or we must
say that anything made of “invisible” “matter” like markets, lawsuits, incentives,
management techniques, etc. is just as guilty as “the social” created by sociologists.

If sociology is now about tracing association, which I consider quite fun, then what is, for example, Political Science about, if properly reassembled?

I am really racking my brain about this and am not sure that reassembling gets us very far outside of sociology. Still, I refuse to say that Geography, for example, is not in need of some reassembling. The key might be “the social” versus sociology in general, hence, “the political” is what is in need of reassembling, or perhaps “the geographic” … hmmm, this is quite messy.